Fears Cobh cancer rate linked to plant ‘baseless’
In a wide-ranging interview in today’s Irish Examiner, Boston native Kerri Clough-Gorr said that while cancer clusters do occur, they are rarely linked to environmental factors.
Prof Clough-Gorr gives an example of how she was convinced her own US neighbourhood was affected by a cancer cluster but that, when the numbers were crunched, there was “no statistical evidence”.
“The Massachusetts State Registry very kindly ran the numbers for me and counted them all up,” said Prof Clough-Gorr. “If you looked at the raw numbers, it looked like there was a lot. But when you did the comparison statistically, there was nothing.
“And then when you looked at the type of cancer everybody had, including my husband, who had a cancer no one had ever seen before, there was no logical reason to connect these cancers except that they happened to live in this one geographic space.”
In the case of Cobh, she said there was this belief that all cancers were higher in the harbour town.
“But ‘all cancers’ doesn’t mean anything as a comparison,” she said.
“‘All cancers’ is a whole bunch of individual diseases that can’t all be related to the same environmental factor.”
Moreover, when they crunched the numbers on Cobh, prostate cancer was higher than the average rate “but is there any evidence anywhere that prostate cancer is linked to an environmental exposure?” Prof Clough-Gorr asked.
In relation to the difficulties filling the post of NCR director — former director Harry Comber retired in June 2014 but returned as interim director until Prof Clough-Gorr took on the role earlier this year — she said the salary was “probably a factor” (starting at about €104,000).
She felt that another factor in the delay may be the fact that it is a dual role — Prof Clough-Gorr is also the first professor of cancer epidemiology at University College Cork.
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