County, school board to tackle Bayshore cancer cluster claims

Almost two decades after the old Bayshore High School building was torn down, the County Board of Commissioners and the School Board of Manatee County will hold a joint meeting Thursday to discuss longstanding claims that the building sickened students and staff and sparked a cancer cluster.

A growing contingent of Bayshore alumni and former staff members have reported health issues, according to Cheryl Jozsa, a Bayshore alumnus who began investigating the incident after her sister died of cancer in 1999. Jozsa said 457 people who attended school on the campus have reported health problems to her.

The meeting will be the first time both boards have sat down officially together to discuss the issue, according to school board spokesman Mike Barber. At an April 25 meeting, cancer victim family members and county officials briefed county commissioners.

“It’s just story after story after story. ... Enough. The parents of children who went to Bayshore deserve to know yes or no regarding their children,” Commissioner Vanessa Baugh said at the time.

The old Bayshore building was located on the same large property as the current school at 5401 34th St. W. in Bradenton and was torn down in 1998. Activists say contaminated well water is to blame for what they call elevated rates of cancer. County officials contend the school was on municipal water as early as 1985 and most likely earlier. Public utility records and newspaper articles support this claim, as previously reported by the Herald.

Emotions have run high at several public meetings on the issue this year. At their April 25 meeting, several county commissioners were moved to tears by stories of cancer deaths, and Commissioner Charles Smith promised to stand with the family members of cancer victims and threatened prison time to anyone behind an alleged coverup. He has not offered any further details.

School Board members Dave Miner and Charlie Kennedy said while they empathized with the pain of the surviving family members, county and school officials need to look at the facts objectively.

“Sometimes all the emotions cloud a rational scientific look at the situation,” Miner said. “Whether that is the case here or not should be determined by arduous review.”

Said board chairman Kennedy: “You want to be respectful of people’s loss, but at the same time this should be a fact-finding mission. You don’t want to cross-examine these people. My big burning question is, who or what is responsible for this.”

Jane Flocks, the director of the Social Policy Division at the University of Florida’s law school, commended the board for pursuing answers.

“As general common sense advice, I would recommend that school board administrators hear out the community’s concerns and try to work with the community to find answers rather than go on the defensive,” she said. “School board members are probably part of this community, too, right? They probably have friends and relatives who could have been affected. This is a community problem.”

One in a billion

Jozsa has compiled data through a Facebook page. She said that as of April 22, 170 alumni had cancer, 92 had died from cancer, 111 had autoimmune illnesses and 85 children of Bayshore alumni had been born with birth defects.

Richard Smith, a statistics and bio-statistics professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, examined Jozsa’s data at her request. He said the number of people who died of cancers related to possible environmental causes was far beyond the expected numbers.

Smith said the number of Bayshore alumni expected to have died from leukemia was 2.46. The number who have actually died, according to Jozsa’s figures, is 17.

The odds of 17 people dying from leukemia when only 2.46 were expected to die? One in a billion, says Smith. Another way to put it: You are 35 times more likely to get all six numbers correct in the Florida lottery than to have that random clustering of leukemia cases.

Smith’s numbers come with a few caveats. His calculations are based on some assumptions, he said, and he used the data Jozsa has collected anecdotally via Facebook and through conversations with alumni. A true analysis, he said, would rely on medical records, combing through the Florida cancer registry and reaching out to as many alumni as possible.

And, he said, many cancer cluster claims end up being unfounded because, although the number of people with cancer in a specific area may be unexpectedly high, unexpected events happen every day.

Researchers in the academic journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology reported that between 1990 to 2011, only three out of 428 cancer cluster investigations resulted in a confirmed cancer cluster.

“Apparent coincidences don’t seem so surprising when you consider the number of ways you could have seen an event occur,” Smith said. “The fact that a coincidence happened specifically to me, I would say, ‘Wow that’s really surprising,’ but what’s the probability that this event would happen to anyone in the United States?”

Smith acknowledges these caveats in his report, but he concludes that the Bayshore case might be too great a coincidence to ignore.

“Nevertheless, one in a billion is an extremely small probability, suggesting the need for further investigation,” he writes.

“You would still tend to see clusters that form just by chance,” he said. “The question is how can you distinguish between ones that form by chance and ones that are indicative of an environmental cause.”

Riverside

Activists say contaminated groundwater from on-campus wells is the source of the cancer cluster. County officials say they know definitively that Bayshore was on municipal water as early as 1984, and old school board minutes, newspaper articles and public records indicate the school may have been on municipal water since it opened in 1962 as Bayshore Junior High School.

Jozsa believes Riverside Products Inc., a defunct metals manufacturing facility a mile north of Bayshore, could have been a source of pollution.

Riverside Products was an independent contract machine shop that had been in business from 1963-94, when they declared bankruptcy. The business manufactured steel, brass and aluminum and used a lightweight oil as a cutting fluid. According to a 1997 preliminary assessment report from the Environmental Protection Agency to determine further action in Superfund cleanup, samples of groundwater, surface water, soil and sediments showed some amount of contamination, including chromium and lead.

But the report determined that a “no further action priority” for future inspection was recommended as there was “minimal concern” of the impact on groundwater, surface water and soils.

This story was originally published May 24, 2017 at 5:29 PM with the headline "County, school board to tackle Bayshore cancer cluster claims."