Very strange. They’re all in the same maternity unit, and according to the hospital’s investigation there’s no “environmental risks which could be linked to the development of a brain tumor, "but something weird is clearly going on there.
I think the best that they can say is that they have not been able to find any environmental risks that currently exist. That’s not the same as saying no environmental risk currently exists and it’s definitely not the same as saying no environmental risk has ever existed. Someone could have temporarily stored something radioactive nearby, for example. Pesticides, solvents, or other carcinogenic substances might also have been used at some point, and might no longer be present.
It would also be interesting to know some details about the “other health concerns” the article mentions.
There is nothing “clearly” about it.
Five people who work together have tumors. What are the odds of that being completely random? Far higher than the zero you’ve assumed.
Is it worth investigating to prove there isn’t a direct link between that workplace and those tumors? Sure. Which seems to be what is going on.
But to assume the conclusion that this is workplace-caused is silly and unwarranted.
I’d argue that it’s more likely to be caused by their workplace than if they worked in, say, a museum or a car dealership, simply because of the wider array of causes you might find in a hospital. Perhaps not a tremendous increase in likelihood.
If I was one of the parents of a baby born in that unit, I’d be a little concerned. Who knows if the newborns were affected by whatever this is?
The article doesn’t mention the nurses’ ages, but there are about 10 incidents of brain tumors per 100,000 in the age range 40-64 (less if they are younger, so conservatively assume 10 per 100,000). We also don’t know how many nurses work in the maternity ward, but it appears that there are 10 doctors there, so probably less than 50 nurses. The probability of a 1/10,000 event happening randomly to 5 people in a group of 50 is about 20 in a billion. I don’t think it’s silly to assume that this is not random.
That’s only if you looked ahead of time and said “what’s the probability of x number of tumours amongst y nurses” with no particular prompt. When you’re looking at a particular case where something unlikely has already occurred you have to consider the trillions of unlikely things that can occur and realise that after-the-fact billion to 1 chances happen all the time.
But you first eliminate the far more likely causes.
They should look into patients and their health.
More likely environmental things would mean long term exposure, I suppose.
I’m thinking of farm workers and the Roundup thing.
Are they related? That would explain it IMO (even if only cousins or second cousins, the odds are significantly reduced)
I guess to completely assume any conclusion without any evidence or thinking process would be silly and unwarranted. That doesn’t seem to be the case here. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem likely to be random. Thanks to @markn_1’s statistical estimations, the apparent likelihood of this being random, or of being caused by completely separate events in the nurses’ lives (which sounds like but is not the same as random), seems to me to be pretty small. No, OP should not rush to judgment, if that’s what you’re worried about.
Is the hospital really doing an investigation, or is it an “investigation” designed to make concerns go away without really delving very deeply? That’s where my concerns would be.
That hospital ought to be evacuated and no one work there until they fully check it out.
It’s not silly and they are correct to look into the possibility of an environmental case. But any kind of semi-rare disease would get similar publicity. One question I have is how the number of semi-rare disease clusters compares to what it would be if environmental causation was extremely rare.
It is not clear from the article if all the benign tumors were discovered due to severe symptoms. Is it possible that nurses with more minimal symptoms are having imaging studies done because of a colleague who has serious benign tumor? I’m guessing that they didn’t get an MRI for zero reason. But benign brain tumor symptoms, like headache, are extremely common, so almost anyone can find a reason for being imaged if they are worried.
Also, how connected in time were the diagnoses? If closely connected and the tumors all required surgical removal to relieve symptoms, your calculated odds starts looking significant to me.
And not just any random tumors, but brain tumors. If one nurse had colon cancer, another had lung cancer, another had breast cancer, that might just be normal. But this is too specific to be coincidence.
Lotta folks are trying real hard to jump the conclusion that something “must” be so. Nope. I agree it’s probably workplace-caused. But the evidence to date doesn’t support “must”. Not even close.
And the statistics sure as hell don’t. As @colinfred said, @markn_1’s back of envelope statistical “analysis” is bunk.
I’m just arguing against the rush to determinism. And as @Beckdawrek said, it’s important to distinguish between investigations intended to discover the truth, and those intended to close the case quietly regardless of the truth.
This story reminds me of what happened at a research facility owned by Amoco (now BP) in Naperville, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago) in the 1980s and 1990s. A cluster of occurrences of brain tumors (nineteen in all) was found among people who worked in one particular building at the facility; an investigation determined that at least six of those cases – all of them a rare type of glioma – were likely work-related.
However, note that (a) it took years to determine this, and (b) only some of the cases were found to have any evidence that exposure to things in the workplace resulted in the tumors.
That’s a pretty darn good article. Lots of diligent effort and still no “smoking gun”.
Some important things to note re cases at the Boston-area hospital:
Most of the time in tumor/cancer “clusters”, no environmental cause is ever discovered. Some reported clusters ultimately are found not to be true clusters according to epidemiologic definitions.
What is the time period over which the maternity unit nurse tumors were diagnosed? That could make a difference in cluster designation.
Two of the reported benign tumors (meningiomas) have no known environmental cause, other than radiation exposure, especially as a child and/or due to therapeutic radiation. Exposure to radiation should be easy enough to check.
The other tumors were reported to be of different types, making a common source of exposure less likely. Aside from meningioma, other benign brain tumors diagnosed on a relatively frequent basis are acoustic neuromas and pituitary adenomas, which can be familial but don’t have environmental triggers of which I’m aware.
“Other health conditions” is so vague as to be useless to speculate about.
Lastly, because it was mentioned by one poster, Roundup has not been clearly linked to malignancy or benign neoplasms either in occupational or casual exposure, and much evidence against such a link exists, lawyers’ ads not withstanding.
Maybe the shielding for the MRI and CT scans is faulty?
Nuclear medicine could be another concern.
Something isn’t right. A full investigation is needed. Thankfully it’s reported the nurses had benign tumors.
Hopefully the nurses will fully recover. Perhaps find a job at a different hospital.
I think I said that. Not that it matters all that much, so I’ll just repeat this part of your post for the sake of emphasis.