CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - New Hampshire health officials said Friday they haven’t found any common cause or origin behind a cancer cluster in the state’s Seacoast region.
The state Department of Health and Human Services for several years has been investigating a greater-than-expected number of cases of two types of rare childhood cancers: rhabdomyosarcoma and pleuropulmonary blastoma.
In a report Friday, the department said that among seven individuals fitting a certain profile for the study, the agency found no common childcare facilities or schools and no identifiable patterns related to drinking water or chemical exposures.
“Out of the seven respondents, there were five different public drinking water systems and one private drinking water well that were identified as residential sources of drinking water; only two of the individuals reported regularly consuming water from public drinking water supplies in the 10-town seacoast area,” the report said.
Health officials said they will continue to review the cases and will reassess the need for further monitoring. They’ve scheduled a public meeting on the report for Thursday in Rye.
In its study, the department used cancer registries last fall to identify individuals in New Hampshire who had been diagnosed with the cancers since 2001 and were under age 20 at the time. It also identified those who met the age and diagnosis criteria in two coastal counties in Maine and Massachusetts.
The department sent questionnaires to the parents of those individuals and to others who asked to participate in the investigation. The questionnaires asked if the participants had spent at least 28 days in any of 10 Seacoast towns in the three states before diagnosis.
Of the 40 participants, seven met the study criteria: five had a confirmed cancer diagnosis and two a probable diagnosis. The report said that the seven participates had been diagnosed over the course of seven years and did not cluster within any specific year.
Officials noted that scientific literature does not point to chemical or environmental exposures as a cause of the cancers; the majority of these types of cancers are thought to either occur sporadically or be associated with genetic predisposition.
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