California Cancer-Cluster Town Finds No Answers

McFARLAND, Calif. - Suppose your town is being stalked by a serial killer. Five people have been slain so far, all of them children. Detectives track several suspects, but eventually the trail turns cold. Fear lingers, and windows are latched snugly each night. Who can say, after all, when the killer might strike again?

Such is the state of life in McFarland, a threadbare town of farmers and farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley in central California. The killer there is not a man but a disease, one that struck with a vengeance for reasons that California's brightest scientists cannot explain.

McFarland is home to the West's best known cancer cluster. Between 1975 and 1989, 13 youngsters ranging from toddlers to teenage football stars came down with cancer - an unusually high rate for a town of 6,200.

The town weathered the initial shock, sustained by a faith that the puzzle would be solved and the cancer's cause eliminated. Instead, six years of scientific studies ending in 1991 failed to expose a culprit, leaving McFarland battered and many of its people anxious, confused and convinced the experts did not - or would not - search far enough.

In McFarland's schools, children run to the nurse with every lump or sore they spot. In the shops, owners grumble that business is not what it was "before the cancer." Stained by the disease scare, the city itself is fiscally ailing. Replacing police with county sheriff protection saved a bit of money, but McFarland may have to disincorporate if its fortunes do not rise soon.

Meanwhile, apprehension hovers over the community's quiet residential streets: When will the cancer return? Will my child be next?

"Something has to have caused this, and with all the brainpower they brought in here I just can't believe they didn't find it," said Jim Price, a McFarland High School volleyball coach whose daughter Kiley, 10, lost a kidney to a malignant tumor. "This town has been torn apart. . . . There are a lot of people with a lot of anger. Maybe if they gave us the answer, we'd have something to be angry at."

Similar frustrations echo through two other California towns notorious for their unsolved cancer clusters - Earlimart, a tiny farm community just up the valley, and Rosamond, near Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert.

Psychologists say inexplicable crises such as cancer clusters inflict emotional devastation on the families and towns they strike. Unlike accidents or natural disasters, which can be attributed to a specific force, a mystery as complex as cancer rarely has a single identifiable cause. Its victims, thus, are left with no person or thing to blame for their pain.

McFarland began talking about cancer in 1984. Connie Rosales, whose teenage son, Randy, had been diagnosed with a type of lymphoma, sounded the alarm. Everywhere she turned, it seemed, there was a stricken child. Mario Bravo died of liver cancer. Tresa Buentello was killed by cancer of the adrenal gland. Frankie Gonzalez lost a leg to bone cancer, and then lost his life.

On Rosales' short street alone, there were five cases - out of 17 homes.

Health officials concluded the cases added up to a cluster. The cancer rate in McFarland, they determined, was about four times what would be expected in a town its size.

Before long, politicians got wind of McFarland's plight. Jesse Jackson led Hollywood celebrities on a march through town, and Cesar Chavez used the cancer victims to illustrate pesticide risks and raise money for the United Farm Workers' grape boycott. McFarland, which had been just another dirt-poor town tucked amid the valley's cotton fields and almond groves, was suddenly in the spotlight.

All of this left the townsfolk divided. Some welcomed the attention, believing exposure would bring a quick cure for their problems. Others dismissed the cluster as a statistical accident, or complained that the publicity would hurt McFarland right when it was on the cusp of growth.

Most people seemed to agree on one thing: If the experts would only get to the bottom of the mystery, residents would feel safe and life could return to normal.

The experts came, and their labors were exhaustive. They tested the water. They tested the air. They studied dirt - scraped from back yards and school playgrounds - and measured radio waves from a Voice of America transmitter nearby. They interviewed victims' parents, and searched their homes for a cancer suspect - household chemicals or asbestos, perhaps.

Also studied - and dismissed as unrelated - were four pesticides used heavily in the region at a time when scientists surmised that something in the environment might have set off the cancers.

Last year, after what may be the longest cancer cluster investigation ever conducted, the state scientists gave up. Nothing they had unearthed could explain the cancers; a panel of independent experts who guided their work concluded enough had been done.

"We didn't find a specific cause, but we did not disprove anything either," said Dr. Richard Kreutzer, a lead state investigator on the cluster. "I'm afraid that is the limit of science. . . . We just can't say with assurance whether something was going on, or whether McFarland had a clump of these cases just by chance."