Cancer Cases In Kids Are Rising. Some Experts Blame Toxic Chemicals. – The Lund Report
This story was jointly reported by Public Health Watch and the Investigative Reporting Workshop.
In April 2008, Jonathan Agin’s 27-month-old daughter, Alexis, was diagnosed with DIPG, a rare brain tumor. Agin, then a civil defense lawyer in Washington, D.C., was dislodged from his comfortable life and dragged into the surreal world of a young cancer victim’s parent: the sleepless nights in the din of a hospital, the grueling clinical trials.
“I always had hope,” Agi…….
This story was jointly reported by Public Health Watch and the Investigative Reporting Workshop.
In April 2008, Jonathan Agin’s 27-month-old daughter, Alexis, was diagnosed with DIPG, a rare brain tumor. Agin, then a civil defense lawyer in Washington, D.C., was dislodged from his comfortable life and dragged into the surreal world of a young cancer victim’s parent: the sleepless nights in the din of a hospital, the grueling clinical trials.
“I always had hope,” Agin said in a recent interview, though he knew most DIPG patients survive no more than two years after diagnosis.
Alexis lived for 33 months after her tumor was found. Toward the end of her life, she was unable to walk or speak. She died at 3:03 p.m. on Jan. 14, 2011.
“My knowledge back then of children with cancer was watching St. Jude and Ronald McDonald House commercials,” Agin said. The image of a “smiling, bald-headed kid living happily ever after” was cruelly misleading, he learned, when it came to intractable cancers like DIPG, short for Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma.
While children with a diagnosis like Alexis’ face almost insurmountable odds, death rates for many childhood cancers have gone down, thanks to advances in treatment. But incidence rates — the number of cancer cases per 100,000 children — increased 43 percent from 1975 to 2018. While there’s no clear explanation, some experts suspect environmental contamination has played a major role.
“These increases are too rapid to be due to genetic change,” pediatrician Philip Landrigan wrote in a report last year for the Childhood Cancer Prevention Initiative, a collaborative that includes the Children’s Environmental Health Network, the American Sustainable Business Council and other organizations.
“They cannot be explained by increased access to medical care or by improvements in diagnosis,” wrote Landrigan, director of the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College. His theory is that exposure in the womb or early childhood to chemicals is driving the trend. “Recognition is growing that hazardous exposures in the environment are powerful causes of cancer in children,” he wrote.
When it comes to drug development, children with cancer — defined as people under the age of 20 — have long been at the back of the line. There simply aren’t enough of them to inspire massive investment. In 2018, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 15,178 children in the United States were diagnosed with cancer and 1,841 died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By comparison, 1.7 million adults were stricken and 599,265 died.
Now comes the realization that some or many of the 86,000 chemicals used at one time or another in the U.S. may be having an outsize effect on the very young. Few of those chemicals have been tested for safety.
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