THE ACREAGE, FL -- Dr. Alina Alonso with the Palm Beach County Health Department told a crowd of Acreage residents what they didn't want to hear Wednesday.
There won't be any air or water or soil samples. They won't be asked questions or told to call their doctors. Their children won't be tested.
No, she says state and local officials already have everything they need to determine if there is a cancer cluster in the Acreage.
"They're relying on the state registry to look at all the different kinds of tumors that happen in The Acreage. That has patients names, their cases, their history, all that information," says Alonso.
The state's registry contains every piece of data on cancer patients in the three zip code radius of The Acreage. Any doctor in the country working with a cancer patient in The Acreage submitted the data to the registry when the patient was being treated.
Officials in Tallahassee are now going through the data, searching for benign or malignant tumors, and trying to isolate how many cases of central nervous system cancers there are in The Acreage.
"What I see here, just looking at it like you the media are looking at it, is we have a lot of different types of cancers, not a high rate of one particular type of cancer," says Alonso.
Cancer cluster studies are quite common, but actual cancer clusters are rare.
Residents in The Acreage analyzing the cluster for themselves say they have more than fifty cases of cancer. Dr. Alonso cautions though any geographic region could contain a high number of cancer patients.
"If we were to take a geographic location, three zip codes of like size and a like geographic area, and I were to go to Oklahoma, and I pulled random people out, I would probably find high incidents of cancer, correct?" asks Holmes.
"Yes, you will," says Alonso.
Scientists will know in mid-August if they have a cluster.
If they do find a cluster, only then will scientists be able to determine what possible agents may be to blame. Finding the actual cause however won't happen anytime soon.
"From cluster to cause, that could be years?" asks Holmes.
"Yes," says Alonso.
On top of that, genetic research would also have to be done to determine why some people have cancer and others do not. That again could add to the length of the findings.
The Health Department will hold another public meeting at the Agricultural Center just west of PBIA on July 30th.
