Bayshore High Gets Clean Bill of Health on Irrigation Wells But Questions Remain

While the results are important in establishing the safety of conditions for the students and faculty at the current campus (which was built on the same footprint of the old campus in 1997), they unfortunately offer no answers in the ongoing quest of alumni to find out whether and to what extent water contamination factored into the cancer anomalies. During the workshop, the district confirmed that it still cannot definitively answer the question as to where the school got its drinking water prior to being connected to public water, sewer and solid waste in April of 1998.

 

As per a joint meeting between the school board and county commission in late May, Jennifer Bencie, Manatee County's health officer for the Florida Department of Health, is planning to work with alumni willing to provide medical records to establish whether or not an identifiable cancer cluster exists. Bencie's department is scheduled to launch an initiative in October for Bayshore alumni to provide such information, which will be used in conjunction with the statewide cancer registry that has been collecting data on cancer incidences since 1981.

 

Bencie has said that her department needs more information, describing a process that has thus far been operating in reverse. More typically, an exposure source is discovered and then sicknesses known to be associated with the toxin are studied among the exposed populations. If you know that a particular toxin was in a population's drinking water for a long period of time, and then cancers associated with that toxin are happening among that population at a much higher rate than is statistically probable, causation is much easier to establish. In Bayshore's case, there are a myriad of different illnesses happening at heightened rates, and the search is for the possible sources, which is much more complicated.

Cheryl Jozsa, a Bayshore alum whose sister was one of four 1979 graduates known to have passed away at a young age from a rare leukemia, has made the only earnest effort thus far to contact alumni and collect information. By starting a Facebook group dedicated to the issue, Jozsa discovered hundreds of alumni who were either sick or dying at young ages and from unlikely causes–particularly leukemia. In fact, Jozsa says the group learned of four more leukemia cases just since May's joint meeting.

 

Jozsa said that Dr. Richard Smith, a biostatistics professor at the University of North Carolina who has been working with the alumni group, had originally put their self-reported leukemia instances (17 where 2.45 would be expected) at one in a billion odds and already considers it a cancer cluster. She said that when Dr. Smith was made aware of the 4 additional cases reported, he told her that were he to replace 17 with 21, it would take the odds to one in 400 billion.

 

Most of the victims and their families had no idea that so many Bayshore alumni had fallen ill. Jozsa and other alumni have long called for an official effort by the county and school district to notify alumni and ask those who think that they or a family member may have been affected to come forward. Thus far, no such effort has been made. Jozsa believes that the obvious answer to where the old school got its drinking water is from wells that had previously been on campus and thinks that contaminants to that source–possibly from the nearby Riverside Products EPA superfund site–may be at the root of the abnormal number of illnesses among alumni.

"I'm glad the school district followed through on having these irrigation wells tested," said Jozsa, "but it is my opinion that the GHD report isn't nearly thorough enough. On six different occasions in the report, it says 'information or data was unavailable,' and it never gets into where the drinking water for the old school came from, which is the most important part. If anyone thinks that these tests of the irrigation wells clear the controversy of the Bayshore High illnesses, they're wrong. We're going to keep fighting until we get complete answers."