Reddit reviews Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation

I'd highly recommend checking out the book Toms River if you're interested in how extremely difficult it is to prove cancer clusters caused by environmental issues.

Someone let me know if I'm completely off base in these calculations...

>The annual incidence of Ewing sarcoma is 2.93 children per 1,000,000. Approximately 200-250 children and adolescents in the United States are diagnosed with a tumor in the Ewing family of tumors each year. Two-thirds will be long-term survivors (more than five years). The tumor occurs with greater frequency in Caucasians. It is extremely rare in African Americans and Asians.

https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/ewing-sarcoma/

So we should expect more Ewing Sarcoma cases in predominantly white areas such as the ones you're describing. Apparently over 91% of adolescent ES cases are in whites (86.3% non hispanic whites). So given the rate of 2.93/1,000,000 is for all children, and given that roughly 50% of the children in the US are white/non-hispanic, then we can estimate that the Ewing Sarcoma incident rate for white children is ~2.5/500,000 annually.

Washington county has a population of 205,000. Apparently 93% are white and 20% are 18 or younger. So that's roughly 46,000 white children in the county. At the rate of 2.5 cases per 500,000 white kids, we would expect about 0.24 cases per year for Washington county.

Again, maybe I'm completely off base here in which case someone feel free to point it out.

One other interesting thing I found is that the rate of adolescent Ewing Sarcoma in New York (which has a statewide fracking ban) is 3.4 per million (standard deviation 0.8). You would expect if fracking was causing these cancers then we would see less than average in New York, especially given their more diverse population (63% white to PA's 81% white).

I grew up in Toms River and just moved back. The book is very well written and pretty accurate. This is the listing if anyone is interested: https://www.amazon.com/Toms-River-Story-Science-Salvation/dp/055380653X

Tap, but his water fountain has a nice charcoal filter as others have said.

If he's drinking from anything other than his filtered water fountain, it's either bottled or from the fridge filtered water dispenser.

My town is the subject of a surprisingly good book because there was a massive cancer cluster here. I grew up being told not to drink the tap water and even though I know it's fine now, old habits die hard and my brain subconsciously dismisses tap water as an actual drinkable beverage no matter where I am.

Yeah and there's even a Pulitzer-prize winning book on how the area was polluted. So Toms River does not appear to be that great.

Tom's River is a great book about a child cancer cluster in NJ.


Even though you mentioned a specific interest in infectious disease, I think Tom's River is a worthwhile addition for anyone in public health, not just those with an interest in environmental health.


It does a great job of tying together the broader scientific, political, environmental, and public health histories and critiques while using Tom's River as a specific case study.


Book: http://www.amazon.com/Toms-River-Story-Science-Salvation/dp/055380653X



NYT Review: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/health/on-the-trail-of-cancer-a-review-of-toms-river-by-dan-fagin.html?referer=

Not necessarily. I'm from Jersey, and lived right near a huge superfund site. The town was the largest studied cancer cluster of all time, IIRC.

Edit: It's also worth watching A Civil Action starring Travolta. It's about a case involving a superfund site in Woburn, Massachusetts.

Also, there's a book about the superfund site by me.

Sources:

Ciba-Geigy

Reich Farm