Cancer Clusters

Today on Dr. Oz, he spoke about Cancer Clusters. There was not even a blip in the S. California area on the Cancer Cluster map but it was interesting to watch and provides some steps for moving forward to help get the area checked out.

I plan to try to report the area as a Cancer Cluster. If you do the same, they may get enough of a response that it peaks their interest and maybe then they will check it out. In the meantime, they gave a four point criteria to see if a given area qualifies as a cluster. It is as follows:

Criterea

1) Greater number of diagnosed cases than expected in a given area (check)

2) Specific Type of Cancer (leukemia) (check)

3) Specific Group of People (children) (check)

4. Specific Geography (check)

If you want to check out the link on the Dr. Oz site, it is posted above

From the Dr. Oz Website: ‘.htmlentities($node->title).’

Maybe some hope?

I know that it has been a while since I have focused my attention over here at the Hot Spot, and those of you who know me understand that my lack of attention is not caused by a lack of value or importance placed on the happenings over here. Those of you who don’t know me can link over to Murray’s blog and maybe that will offer some explanation for my absence.

In the meantime, as I have been slowly crawling my way through my grief, and while I had already begun to focus my attention back in this direction, a new development has arisen which has kicked my attention into high gear. I recently received the e-mail copied below and, while it offers no answers and no guaranties, it does offer hope that there may be some interest or recognition by the infamous ‘they’ who may be able to, eventually, get to the answers. If you are someone, or know of someone who would be interested in contacting the sender of this email, please feel free to leave a message with your contact information and we will respond. In the meantime, I think I am going to go in a little bit of a different direction with the blog than I had originally intended. You will have to stay tuned to see what this will be all about!

Hello,

this is  Hannah’s mom. The reason for my email is that , my husband works for — Hospital and last week he was talking to a lead physician in the cancer center and he was commenting on the amount of cases of leaukemia here at Mitchell school and what we as parents can do to protect our kids. What was wierd was that something similar happened a few years ago in Thousand Oaks and it had to do with some contaminated soil due to world war two.. Anyways when the Dr heard what was going on he put in a report to the department of public health and they are going to look into it more and they recently contacted the Dr. asking them for the names of the parents of the children that were diognosed with leaukemia within the past few years. If you can do me the favor and either give me the names and numbers or if you feel more comfortable contacting them first letting them know that the Department of public health wanted to gather more info. Thank You so much for your concern —

Why Blog?

I blog. I am a blogger. It is something that I like to do and I find it cathartic and productive, though most of my blogging is done on private, password protected blogs. But this blog is not about me. It is about a small, but growing army of children who are marching into a war, returning safely home from war, or who we will sadly remember and keep in our hearts because they have been lost in battle. This army of beautiful and innocent children are bound together, not only by their fight against childhood leukemia, but by the geographic location of their homes.

In the past seven years, I have know, or known of, not one, not two, not three, but SEVEN children who are fighting, or who have fought against this horrendous disease. They all live in the Santa Clarita area but, more specifically, they live in the part of Santa Clarita known as Canyon Country. Even more specifically than that, they live in the Canyon Country area know as Sand Canyon. And even more specifically than that, they all lived in the neighborhoods around Mitchell Community School.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that the connection is the school. After all, some of these children were sick before entering kindergarten. Furthermore, none of the teachers in this school, some of whom have been there for 20 years, have been diagnosed with leukemia. Rather, it is specifically the area around the school that I find concerning.

Whenever I question this high incidence of leukemia, people always seem to express similar concerns. They have worried about the same thing for years. “Somebody ought to do something” they say. “How many kids need to be sick before ‘they’ investigate?” “Why don’t they do something?”

I don’t really know who ‘they’ are and why they aren’t doing something about this. I don’t know why they are not investigating. And if they are investigating, I don’t know why they are being so secretive about it. Because whenever I try to look up information about this, I find nothing. There are no answers, only questions.

I am not a big and powerful person. I don’t know how to make change happen. I don’t know how to grease wheels and get things going. I am a blogger. I know what I know and I think what I think. And I write.

So here, in the pages of this blog, I intend to chronicle, one by one, the lives and stories of the beautiful and brave children who have been sent into this horrific war. And if, in doing so, I provide a place where other people can add input, or where ‘they’ could answer questions, or where other people could add to the ever growing list of questions to be answered, well then, that works too!

And, even in the very preliminary planning of this blog, I have already been informed of one such question… As I discussed and planned out the format for this blog, it has been brought to my attention that, not only do we have a disproportionate number of children with leukemia, but apparently, the area from Sand Canyon to Bakersfield, it has been reported, seems to have an astronomical number of women diagnosed with breast cancer. And, while I can probably only handle one battle at a time, this is not unrelated and, should this, at some point be a focus here on these pages, then hopefully, that will be helpful too.

In the meantime, stay tuned for Olivia’s story.