Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
TOMS RIVER -- Family interviews, the major component of an epidemiological study of children with cancer, are almost done, with only four families still to be contacted, state health officials said.
But officials cautioned residents who attended a meeting of the Citizens Action Committee on Childhood Cancer Cluster on Monday that they are not yet sure when information obtained from the family interviews will be released to the public.
Researchers already have completed telephone interviews with 40 families of children who were diagnosed with brain cancer, central nervous system cancer or leukemia while living in Dover Township from 1979 to 1996.
So far, 156 families in the control group also have been interviewed, said Dr. Jerry Fagliano, an epidemiologist with the state Department of Health and Senior Services. The control group consists of families with children who did not develop cancer, and researchers hoped to interview four control group families for each family of a child who did develop the disease.
The study seeks to explain why the incidence of certain cancers in Dover is higher than elsewhere. It will compare the lifestyles, personal histories and work experience of families whose children developed cancer with other families whose children did not develop the disease.
Fagliano said interviews with two more control group families will be completed this week. Once all the interviews are completed, researchers will begin analyzing the data.
Health officials have said they hope to input all the data and have the analysis done by early spring.
When questioned at Monday's meeting about their plans to release the data, health officials were noncommittal.
"We have to decide whether we can safely share this information before we get all the results," said James S. Blumenstock, acting senior assistant health commissioner. "We want to be timely, but we do not want to compromise the scientific process."
Blumenstock and Fagliano said it could damage the health department's credibility if preliminary conclusions from the epidemiological study were released and then contradicted by other research.
"We have not decided yet when to release the data," Fagliano said. He said researchers might decide it would be better to wait until they receive information that will be obtained from a computer modeling project that is recreating the township's water distribution system.
The project will attempt to determine if families of children with cancer ingested more polluted water than families whose children did not develop the disease.
"Our intention was to look at all the factors as simultaneously as we can," Fagliano said.
Source: Asbury Park Press
Published: December 16, 1998
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