Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
TOMS RIVER -- When a state epidemiologist said last night that a report on statewide cancer rates has been delayed for several months, it raised the ire of some members of the Citizens Action Committee on Childhood Cancer Cluster, who have long fought for faster reporting of cancer cases.
"We were assured, by Gov. Whitman, that this would not happen again," citizens committee Chairwoman Linda L. Gillick said about the delay in completing the state report.
The report was initially scheduled to be released July 1. It is now expected to be released in November.
Dr. Eddy Bresnitz, state epidemiologist and assistant commissioner in the state Department of Health and Senior Services, attributed the delay in completing the five-year study of cancer rates to several factors.
Bresnitz noted that the new study, which looks at cancer rates for the years 1996 through 2000, uses 2000 U.S. Census data for the first time, and also adds a category for Hispanic cancer patients. Previous studies classified patient's race as either white, black or "other."
Bresnitz also said there have been several retirements of prominent epidemiologists in the state, and several others have left to take positions in other states, leaving the department a bit short-handed.
State health officials have also been working on other projects, including an investigation of a possible cancer cluster at Ocean County College and developing a comprehensive cancer control plan for the entire state.
Senior Assistant State Health Commissioner James S. Blumenstock did have good news for the residents in attendance last night, when he revealed that no new cases of childhood cancer have been diagnosed in Dover Township so far this year.
Two cases were diagnosed in 2001, Blumenstock said, but they were not cases of leukemia or central nervous system cancers. Those types of cancers were found to be elevated in township children, leading to a massive epidemiological study, the results of which were released last December.
Blumenstock said there were six cases of childhood cancer diagnosed in Dover in 2000.
Bresnitz cautioned that the figures for this year are very preliminary, because hospitals have up to six months to report new cancer cases.
Gillick and other members of the citizens committee, as well as several residents who attended last night's meeting, seemed dissatisfied with the reasons Bresnitz gave for the delay in completing the five-year analysis.
One of the results of the six-year-long investigation into elevated levels of some childhood cancers in Dover was the updating of the New Jersey Cancer Registry, which in 1996 had a seven-year backlog of unrecorded cancer cases.
As a result of the Dover investigation, hospitals are required to report all new cancer cases within six months of diagnoses, or face warnings and fines from the state Health Department. Bresnitz said fines were issued for the first time this year.
He said less than 5 percent of the cancer cases diagnosed are reported late by hospitals.
Blumenstock said he believes the cancer registry data is much improved and reporting is much faster than it was a decade ago, before the Dover investigation began. He described the delay this year in completing the report as a "slight slippage."
Bresnitz said that the state health department has also been work-ing with Rutgers University's En-vironmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute to to develop a protocol for the cancer cluster "rapid response team," that Gov. McGreevey has funded.
The team will likely work with a cancer cluster task force, consist-ing of interested citizens, epide-miologists, physicians and other researchers, to develop a method to investigate future cancer clus-ters in the state.
Kevin Root, a member of the citi-zens committee, said he was not happy with Bresnitz's comment that the rapid response team will make the next year "a planning year," to research the best strate-gies for investigating cancer clus-ters. Root said he hoped it does not take five years for the state to implement its rapid response team.
Bresnitz said state officials are still investigating residents' and officials' concerns about possible cancer clusters in their areas, even though the rapid response team is not yet in operation.
Published in the Asbury Park Press 10/29/02
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