Toms River

David Baltierra

3/12/16

w.democracynow.org/topics/new_jersey

 

 

Dan Fagin who is an Environmental reporter gives us a very good hypothesis of what has inspired at Toms River in regards of stricken children with the dumping by chemical giant Ciba-Geigy Corp. This clandestine disposal may be caused by abnormally high number of childhood cancer cases in the 1980s and 90s.

The residents at Toms River believed that their prayers had been answered to them by having the Swiss chemical company, Ciba relocate to Tom River.  Since the economy was somewhat stable they felt good about this move. Not knowing that the company has had a bad rap sheet, they continued on.  However during the course of time children and adults became sick with childhood cancer.  One of the resident linda Gillick became an out spoken person for her fight for your son who was one of the children who became ill with cancer.  In this article Dan says that he was very interested in hat that they're interested in is what I'm interested in to study on the simple concept of epidemiology. However Dan went to do some investigation and in his findings this is what he came up with. In his first findings was the misunderstanding was the nature of clustering itself.  In other words when things are just or people or rice thrown in the air and they just come down in clusters on the floor. As Berry knew, everything clustered to a degree, often for no reason other than chance. Nothing that was subject to the complexities of the natural world, whether birds in a flock or sick people in a city, was distributed evenly in space and time. Some clumping was inevitable. In cancer incidence studies, the challenge was not to find the clumps—that was usually pretty easy, thanks to the registry—but to identify which were likely to have an underlying cause other than randomness. Dan said "A more striking way to think about that was that an American man faced a 44 percent chance of getting cancer at some point during his life; for women, the lifetime risk was 38 percent ".  I am always glad that there are people like Linda to show up with so much care for her son to go out to fight this giant. It just shows that when people get together or active action takes place. With so many cases, it was inevitable that some neighborhoods would have surprisingly high concentrations of cancer—again, for no reason other than bad luck. "People just didn't realize how much cancer there is all over," Berry would later explain.

Finally in my conclusion many of the people who called Berry to report a possible cluster assumed that cancer was a single disease instead of a catchall term applied to more than 150 distinct conditions. With all theses cancers involved uncontrolled cell division triggered by genetic damage, but many had little else in common by the time Berry finished clearing up those misconceptions about cancer and then moved on to the deficiencies of the state registry, with its out-of-date and incomplete records, many callers were so discouraged that they dropped their request for a cluster investigation.