Among the new state laws that went into effect Tuesday is a measure designed to make it easier to study potential cancer clusters around industrial sites.
House Bill 483, sponsored by Rep. Katrina Jackson, D-Monroe, allows the Louisiana Tumor Registry, which keeps cancer statistics for the state, to release data at the census tract level. Previously, the agency was only allowed to publicly release data on cancer statistics at the parish level.
The new law also requires that the tumor registry prepare an annual statistical report on cancer rates and counts that includes data at the census tract level.
The legislation was hailed as a victory by environmental groups that have long sought easier access to cancer statistics at the census tract level. Census tracts are small geographic areas used the U.S. Census Bureau that typically contain about 4,000 people. Environmentalists concerned about what appear to be abnormally high cancer rates in areas along the state’s chemical corridor say getting easier access to incidence rates for limited geographic areas—like those in the immediate vicinity of industrial plants—will help better determine the correlation between plant activity and disease.
“We view this is an important first step,” says Kathy Wascom, legislative liaison for the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, or LEAN. “The bottom line is to get more data about cancer rates in immediate area of industrial plants.”
Though the law went into effect Aug. 1, scientists with the Louisiana Tumor Registry say it will be a while, perhaps months, before the data is available because it is currently not compiled and aggregated at the census tract level. What’s more, they say census tract level data is often too small to be statistically significant, so even after they make it available it will likely include several years of data bundled together.
“When the underlying sample is so small it makes the rate potentially unreliable so that is one reason we have not released census tract level data in the past,” says Lauren Maniscalco, a liaison with the Louisiana Tumor Registry.
Environmental activists say they understand the rules of statistics but they also say when dozens of people all living near each other in the shadow of a chemical plant are diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, as has happened in communities along the Mississippi River, somebody has to start demanding answers.
“Until you start to ask the right questions you don’t realize that data is not giving you the information you need,” Wascom says.
Officials with the Louisiana Tumor Registry are meeting next week with statisticians and software engineers to figure out how best to begin compiling census level data to comply with the new law.
“We want our data to be used,” says Maniscalco. “But we also want it to be accurate.”
—Stephanie Riegel
