Toms River by Dan Fagin Page B

much more fruitful area of medicine than cancer epidemiology: infectious disease. 7
    For all his progressive impulses, Walther Hesse, who died in 1911, never fully grasped the importance of what he and Friedrich Härting accomplished in Schneeberg in 1878. For the first time, someone had taken the tools of infectious disease epidemiology—case counts, geographic and temporal patterns, interviews, environmental measurements, physical examinations—and applied them rigorously to cancer. The result was a confirmed cancer cluster, the first one that could withstand doubters’ scrutiny. Later, other German scientists—most notably Ludwig Rehn, who first linked bladder cancer to aniline dye manufacture in Frankfurt in 1895—would be inspired by the Schneeberg work. True, Hesse and Härting had failed to identify the specific cause of the lung cancer epidemic in Schneeberg, but as subsequent generations of epidemiologists would affirm in Toms Riverand elsewhere, it was extremely difficult to complete even the first step of confirming a nonrandom, true cancer cluster. The second step, determining a true cluster’s likely cause, was just about impossible in most cases—but not in Schneeberg, as it turned out.
    What Hesse and Härting did not know was that the mineshafts of Schneeberg were veritable shooting galleries of high-energy gamma rays and fast-moving particles emitted by the unstable nuclei of radioactive elements like radon, bismuth, cobalt, nickel, and uranium in smaltite and other local minerals. Experimenting in the 1890s with minerals from the Erzgebirge, Henri Becquerel and Marie Curie, among others, identified the basic processes of radioactivity. Soon after, researchers returned to the mines with photographic plates, Geiger counters, and other tools to measure radiation. Most of the sources of radioactivity in the mines, it turned out, were metallic elements, but one—radon, formed by the radioactive decay of uranium and radium—was a gas that could be easily inhaled. Soon after the Nazis occupied Bohemia in 1938, they discovered that lung cancer was an epidemic among miners in Joachimsthal as well as Schneeberg. The Germans launched an ambitious study of the two mining centers, conducting autopsies on dead miners, experimenting on animals, and taking extensive radon measurements in the tunnels. 8 By 1939 they were certain that radon was the cause of the lung cancer epidemics in Schneeberg and Joachimsthal, and they were right. That knowledge, however, did not end the abusive conditions at both locations, especially after the prospect of atomic weaponry made uranium the most precious natural resource in the world. After the war, Joseph Stalin used slave labor at Joachimsthal to build the Soviet Union’s atomic stockpile. The U.S. government, meanwhile, downplayed similar evidence of widespread lung cancer among miners on the Colorado Plateau as it rushed to secure fissionable uranium for nuclear weapons. Even now, radon remains one of the few environmental carcinogens over which there is little debate—it is second only to cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer in the United States, responsible for an estimated twenty-one thousand deaths each year thanks to its ubiquity in many types of soil. 9
    Using every technique and tool he could think of, Walther Hessehad managed to find a cancer cluster in one of the most obvious places in the world to look for one. His successors even succeeded in identifying its cause. For the nascent science of cancer epidemiology, it was a misleadingly promising start.
    The slow awakening on Cardinal Drive in the early 1980s was not happening in a vacuum. The world was changing, too, and some parts of it were changing much faster than Toms River. In 1977, a
Niagara Gazette
reporter named Michael Brown began investigating reports of illnesses and pollution in a working-class neighborhood of his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. The neighborhood came to be known as Love Canal