Risk of rare cancer elevated in N.E. Pa.

McADOO, Pa. - The federal government, in a survey released yesterday, confirmed an elevated number of rare cancer cases in three Northeast Pennsylvania counties but found no link between the disease and environmental factors.

The report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry looked at 38 cases of polycythemia vera - a bone marrow cancer - in Schuylkill, Luzerne and Carbon Counties, including areas near what was one of the worst toxic-waste dumps in the country.

"There's an elevation here," said Steve Dearwent, the agency's chief of health investigations. But he cautioned that the study had significant limitations that prevented officials from being able to report exactly how elevated the rate is.

"We can't say it's two times higher, it's three times higher. We can't quantify it," he said.

"But it appears there are more cases than we would expect."

But federal scientists found that individuals diagnosed with PV did not share common occupations, water sources, or other identifiable environmental exposures and that groups of cases were scattered throughout the tri-county area in no predictable pattern.

The Agency for Toxic Substances became involved after 97 cases of PV in Schuylkill, Carbon and Luzerne Counties were reported to the state cancer registry between 2001 and 2005. Based on its population, the region should have reported about 25 cases.

The survey's release comes almost 30 years after the closing of an illegal waste dump in an abandoned mine, containing nearly 7,000 drums of chemicals in this Schuylkill County community about 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

The state Department of Health requested the federal survey in 2006 after area residents complained about seemingly high rates of disease. Yesterday, it said it would continue to review cases of PV.

"The department has committed to monitor the cases and see what might be causing this disease," said Michael Huff, deputy health secretary.

The report offered little solace to Patti Dreyser and other residents of this environmentally ravaged coal-mining community whose families have suffered from serious diseases they believe are connected to the waste.

"We would hope they would go back and review the cleanups, because we believe the wells are contaminated," said Dreyser, who lives several hundred feet from one of the dump sites and whose sister died in 2005 of a rare form of cancer called signet ring cell.

Betty and Lester Kester's mobile home is sandwiched between the Superfund site, half a mile up the mountain, and a reservoir that residents say shows evidence of contamination.

State officials say the reservoir water is safe to drink, but residents say tumors in the small-mouthed bass pulled from the reservoir and the water's orange discoloration from mine runoff reveal otherwise.

Both the Kesters have polycythemia vera.

Betty Kester, 79, has been virtually homebound for two years. Sitting beside her picture window overlooking the fall colors along Broad Mountain, she describes fatigue and joint pain so severe it takes all her strength just to get out of bed in the morning.

"The doctors flipped out" after her diagnosis in 2002, two years after her husband's diagnosis, she said. "They couldn't believe there were two cases in one family."

An informal survey done by residents found people living in 70 of 100 homes within a half-mile of the abandoned mine have experienced some form of serious disease, said Joe Murphy, 41, an activist who lives a few miles away and has multiple sclerosis.

A 2005 state Department of Environmental Protection study found no well contamination along the Kesters' street. Still, Murphy has been leading the call for more scientific research. "Based on the sheer volume of dumping, it had to go somewhere," said Murphy. "There are fractures in the system linking to the aquifer and reservoir."

Betty Kester, who spends her days knitting afghans and taking care of her husband, said she was angry that their retirement years had been such a struggle because of their debilitating disease.

"I'm very bitter," she said. "But I'm not giving up the ship. I don't want it to sink."

Like many communities in this region, McAdoo was built - and later collapsed - on the fortunes of the coal industry.

Evidence of the once-prosperous main street here is barely visible beneath the slipshod remodeling jobs that have scarred several blocks of historic buildings. Vacant storefronts and an empty diner pass for the downtown now, but hints of the ethnic miner heritage remain: the Welsh Congregational and Ukrainian Orthodox churches and the pierogi supper notices plastered on light posts.

The coal trucks still rumble through town along Route 309, carrying not lumps of coal for home heating but finer, leftover material used for power generation.

The power plant sits above the infamous eight-acre site where McAdoo Associates in 1975 began operating a metal-reclamation business, trucking in chemicals from scores of industries in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.

The waste was supposed to be reused, but instead the company was using the abandoned mine as a open sewer. It dumped additional waste in another old mine a block off the town's main street. The state pulled the plug on McAdoo Associates in 1979, and the cleanup began five years later, when it was declared a federal Superfund site. At one point, the site was regarded as the biggest environmental hazard in Pennsylvania.

In 1987, 69 firms signed an agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to help cover the cost of the cleanup, among them ITT Corp., Johnson & Johnson Products Inc., and Allied-Signal Inc.

But as the cleanup was beginning, concerns were growing among residents over the unusually high number of serious health problems that were plaguing their community.

"It seemed everyone you talked to either had cancer or knew someone with cancer," said Murphy. "Doctors would say, 'What's going on up there?' "

After decades of living amid the contamination and being fearful about the air they breathe and the water they drink, residents still feel a sense of unease about their environment.

Frederick Cann Sr., 76, whose house abuts the smaller McAdoo waste site, gave up his vegetable garden.

"I used to have a nice garden, but I was afraid the ground was contaminated," said Cann, whose wife has lupus and who suffers from asthma and other maladies. "I would never plant again."

He and others worry about the lingering effects of the waste beneath their land and say they are now threatened by new companies proposing dumping river dredge - which they contend could contain potentially hazardous substances - in the abandoned mines.

"How much more can we take?" said Dreyer. "We can't live like this anymore."