In early 1961, four young children living near St. John Brebeuf Church and elementary school in Niles died of leukemia. Alarmed by the deaths, parishioners soon discovered four more children in the same neighborhood also were suffering from the disease.
Fears that something in the school or the neighborhood was making the children ill prompted worried residents to ask federal officials to begin the exhaustive medical detective work to find the culprit.
No common cause ever was found. Researchers attributed the high incidence of leukemia among St. John Brebeuf children to chance.
Now, 33 years later, Plum Grove Junior High School in Rolling Meadows faces a similar cancer mystery. Teachers at the northwest suburban school say as many as 20 faculty members have developed cancer since the early ’80s and seven have died as a result.
As with the Niles experience, finding a link between those cancer cases may prove elusive, experts say. Such is the difficulty of demonstrating that a “cancer cluster” has a direct, common and identifiable cause.
The Plum Grove Junior High School inquiry has just begun, and preliminary results won’t come until later this month. And although the possibility exists that a common cause might be found, the history of research in such cases argues against it.
Each year, hundreds of communities nationwide seek the help of health officials because they believe they live in the midst of a cancer cluster. And the evidence, notably in the form of seemingly abnormal rates of cancer, is compelling.
But most often, experts say, suspected cancer clusters usually are statistical anomalies.
In fact, the only cancer clusters where a common cause has been clearly demonstrated have been in occupational settings, according to the American Cancer Society.
A good illustration of statistical anomalies can be seen in the tossing of a coin.
If a quarter is flipped in 100 sequences of 10 flips each, most sequences will show “heads” or “tails” occurring about equally.
More Top Picks Best Bread Lames
But according to statistical probability, it is likely that about five of those 100 sequences will show an unusually high or low number of heads or tails.
Likewise, a community might have the bad luck of having far more cases of a particular kind of cancer than national averages would predict.
“Things do, in fact, occur by chance,” said Faith Davis, an epidemiologist in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “You can see a chance clustering of a rare disease without it having anything to do with the environment they are in.”
The Niles case was one of the first cancer clusters to be studied intensively by health authorities.
In 1961, the leukemia rate among children in Niles was 21.3 cases per 100,000. Statewide in Illinois that year the rate was only 4.6 cases per 100,000.
“A good deal of this started in the Niles leukemia study, when I was first breaking into epidemiology,” said Dr. Clark Heath, who had just gone to work for the national Centers for Disease Control when the agency sent him to Niles. Now he is vice president of the American Cancer Society in charge of epidemiology and surveillance.
Heath teamed up with Dr. Robert Hasterlik of the University of Chicago Medical School, who put together a team of state and local health officials and specialists.
The doctors pulled together exhaustive medical case histories of the sick children, their families, neighbors and schoolmates. They oversaw every environmental test known at the time, testing water sources and looking for possible sources of radiation.
In the end, the investigation cost a lot of money and manpower over two years, and came up with precious little.
But the investigation did provide some reassurance to parents that nothing in the environment in the neighborhood or school was causing leukemia.
“The terror was that parents wondered if they were sending their kids to a school, unwittingly exposing them to an unknown cancer agent in the cafeteria food, water, lights or whatever,” said Rev. Jim Close. Now the head of Mercy Boys and Girls Homes of Chicago, Close was assigned to St. John Brebeuf when Heath released his report in 1963.
Plum Grove Junior High School was built in 1961.
Last year, after the school underwent a $5 million renovation that included removal of asbestos insulation, several students and staff members began complaining about respiratory ailments. Those reports triggered discussions of other health concerns that eventually centered on the number of teachers in the school who had developed cancer.
Kathy Merkelz, the teachers union representative, said 20 teachers at the school had contracted cancer in some form in the last 12 to 14 years. Seven of them have died from their illnesses, she said.
District officials have different numbers. The district says that there have been at least nine cases of cancer with five deaths among the approximately 125 teachers, administrators and support staff who have worked at the school since 1982.
According to the teachers’ accounting, about half of the 20 cases were breast cancer, and the rest included leukemia and stomach, skin and brain cancer, Merkelz said.
That there is a variety of cancer types casts doubt on the likelihood that the illnesses stem from the same source, namely, something in Plum Grove Junior High School, medical experts say.
Although more is known today about cancer, the testing process isn’t all that different than that used in the Niles investigation.
Turnkey Environmental Consultants Inc. of Mt. Prospect is analyzing the water, air and soil samples taken at Plum Grove last month. Similar tests this year showed no irregularities.
The environmental tests are designed to identify if a variety of substances, such as lead, chromium, dioxins or pesticides, are present in the samples at dangerous levels.
Dr. Peter Orris, an epidemiologist and director of Corporate Health Services at Northwest Community Hospital, is going through the stacks of medical questionnaires completed at the end of May by the school’s staff and students, both past and present.
The surveys allow researchers to make a tally of the number of documented cancers at the school, so that total can be compared with local and national rates of cancer.
If the comparison shows there are more cancers than normally expected, researchers will dig deeper into the background of individual cancer victims, asking whether they smoked, their diet and their family medical history.
Processing such data into meaningful information is a tricky business, however, because cancer is such a baffling disease.
“It’s a little like looking at clouds and thinking you’re seeing something, and it’s not really there,” said Dr. Robert Miller, National Cancer Institute epidemiologist in Washington, D.C.
When scientists have been able to demonstrate a common cause for a cluster of cancer cases, it most often has been in occupational settings, Miller said.
In those cases, workers become diseased after being exposed repeatedly to a cancer-causing agent. It might be a radioactive leak in a nuclear facility, or asbestos or certain chemicals, like vinyl chloride in the plastics industry.
More Top Picks Best Reading Wedges For Bed
Those cases are easier to prove because investigators are studying small groups of people in controlled, well-defined environments over specified periods of time.
In community settings such as Niles or Rolling Meadows, people move into and out of the area much more frequently. Pinpointing times and places of possible environmental exposures to potential cancer-causing agents is much more difficult.
After Heath and his peers attributed the Niles leukemia episode to chance in 1963, the incidence of the disease in the community returned to more or less normal levels.
“When the report came out (in 1963) there was no great sigh of relief, that I can remember,” said Joe Salerno, a retired village employee. “People were still worried, but they took a wait-and-see attitude. Things got quieter, and when nothing happened after that, the scare just petered out and got forgotten.”