An Epidemiologist's Nightmare

Chinese pollution. Photo by Robert Gagnon via Flickr I'll say it again: You can sympathize with the people who drank the water and abhor the polluters and still not be persuaded that there was a cancer outbreak. That sums up the message of my recent posts on Erin Brockovich and the article I wrote for Slate on the Toms River cancer cluster. It could apply just as easily to the case in Woburn, Massachusetts, which was made famous by Jonathan Harr's book, A Civil Action. Woburn and Toms River are the only two places in the United States where epidemiologists have found an association -- a very murky one -- between pollution and cancer in some of the residents. Both incidents involved childhood leukemia, and the number of excess cases finally attributed to toxic effluents was about half a dozen in each town, occurring over a period of 10 or ...