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  3. Community cancer clusters are viewed quite differently by citizen activists

Community cancer clusters are viewed quite differently by citizen activists

游客2025-04-20  26
问题     Community cancer clusters are viewed quite differently by citizen activists than by epidemiologists. Environmentalists and concerned local residents, for instance, might immediately suspect environmental radiation as the culprit when a high incidence of cancer cases occurs near a nuclear facility. Epidemiologists, in contrast, would be more likely to say that the incidences were "inconclusive" or the result of pure chance. And when a breast cancer survivor, Lorraine Pace, mapped 20 breast cancer cases occurring in her West Islip, Long Island, community,  her rudimentary research efforts were guided more by hope--that a specific environmental agent could be correlated with the cancers than by scientific method.
    When epidemiologists study clusters of cancer cases and other noncontagious conditions such as birth defects or miscarriage, they take several variables into account, such as background rate (the number of people affected in the general population), cluster size, and specificity (any notable characteristics of the individual affected in each case). If a cluster is both large and specific, it is easier for epidemiologists to assign blame. Not only must each variable he considered on its own, but it must also be combined with others. Lung cancer is very common in the general population. Yet when a huge number of cases turned up among World War Ⅱ shipbuilders who had all worked with asbestos, the size of the duster and the fact that the men had had similar occupational asbestos exposures enabled epidemiologists to assign blame to the fibrous mineral.
    Although several known carcinogens have been discovered through these kinds of occupational or medical clusters, only one community cancer cluster has ever been traced to an environmental cause. Health officials often discount a community’s suspicion of a common environmental cause because citizens tend to include cases that were diagnosed before the afflicted individuals moved into the neighborhood. Add to this the problem of cancer’s latency. Unlike an infectious disease such as cholera, which is caused by a recent exposure to food or water contaminated with the cholera bacterium, cancer may have its roots in an exposure that occurred 10 to 20 years earlier.
    Do all these caveats mean that the hard work of Lorraine Pace and other community activists is for nothing? Not necessarily. Together with many other reports of breast cancer clusters on Long Island, the West Islip situation highlighted by Pace has helped epidemiologists lay the groundwork for a well designed scientific study.  [br] The case of the World War Ⅱ shipbuilders with lung cancer is an example of ______.
选项 A、an occupational cluster
B、a medical cluster
C、a radiation cluster
D、an environmental cluster
答案 A
解析 第二段最后一句提到，在第二次世界大战期间，在石棉环境下工作的造船工人大量患上肺癌，患肺癌的群体之大，而且都在石棉环境下工作这个事实，使得流行病研究者将发病原因归结为是石棉纤维造成的。言外之意，这是与职业有关的病。
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