Small `Cancer-Cluster' Town Awaits Answers -- New Questions Resurrect Old, Bitter Feuds In California Community

McFARLAND, Calif. - For the better part of two decades now, this tiny central California farm town has baffled health officials and government scientists searching for a deadly agent in the environment.

McFarland has seen 21 of its children stricken with cancer since 1975 - more than three times the expected rate for a community of 8,000.

So when science failed to pinpoint a culprit it left this San Joaquin Valley town north of Bakersfield in a peculiar limbo, neither damned nor vindicated. Part of McFarland is grateful that it dodged a verdict. Part of McFarland, especially the farm workers whose children became sick or died, feels cheated.

Now a new team of investigators, this one from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has converged on the poor, mostly Latino town with a promise to test the water, air and soil in a more definitive way and determine once and for all if McFarland is safe.

Digging up old feuds

The study is a year from completion, but already it has brought back bitter feelings, setting a hard line between those wanting to put behind the "cancer cluster" for the sake of economic development and those pressing the EPA to do all it can to find a cause, no matter the cost to the town's renewal.

Like most of the town's movers and shakers, City Manager Gary Johnson works hard to punctuate the positive. His tour of McFarland takes in the housing tracts and privately run prison under construction, the new McDonald's that took no shortage of courting. He manages to bypass one landmark: the neighborhood of stucco houses where the first cancers were discovered.

"It's seven people who are moaning and griping and making the EPA come in," said Johnson, who also owns the hardware store. "We've got 8,000 other residents who prefer that the feds leave town."

The cancers came to the public's attention in 1984 after Connie Rosales was told that her teenage son had lymphoma. She began comparing notes with other mothers in her neighborhood and alerted county health officials to the stunning news: On her tiny block alone, five children were stricken with cancer. From 1984 to 1992, nine more children - toddlers and a teenage football star - were added to the list.

Of the 14 cases, half ended in death.

A deepening mystery

The chances of so many childhood cancers concentrated in such a small place ranged from 1 in 100 to 1 in 1,000 - a so-called "cancer cluster," experts determined. County and state investigators began collecting water samples from houses and municipal wells and tested for about 100 chemicals. They scraped soil samples from parks, playgrounds, yards. They even measured radio frequency waves from a Voice of America transmitter at the edge of town. Nothing conclusive turned up.

If the culprit was an agricultural contaminant, why were the children suffering from so many different kinds of cancer - liver, lymph node, blood, bone, eye, adrenal, kidney? And what about the other kids suffering weight and hair loss and a variety of other inexplicable ailments?

These were questions that government and university scientists and health officials could never answer. The investigation ended in 1992 with some scientists leaning toward a farm chemical and others concluding that it was a "random aggregation," something akin to flipping a coin and landing heads a dozen consecutive times.

"How could the experts call it a complete investigation when they never took deep-core samples of the soil or tested the air?" asked Marta Salinas, a farm worker who left McFarland in 1991 out of concern for her children's health.

The investigators went away but after a brief lull the cancers came back: Seven more children have been diagnosed since 1992.

After learning of the new cases, Salinas and a handful of residents petitioned the EPA.

The federal agency looked over the previous task-force study, found it lacking in spots and agreed to conduct a more thorough inquiry.

Casting a pall on business

The test kits and questions have returned to this town, and that doesn't please local business and civic leaders, many of whom never thought there was a problem in the first place. The federal team - and the reporters who invariably follow in tow - are coming at the most inopportune time, they say. After years of operating in the red, the town is finally tasting the fruits of revival.

For City Manager Johnson, a Kern County native, McFarland's growth gets personal. Every year, when the state comes out with its new population figures, Johnson drives out to the local highway sign and adds a few more numbers to the grand total.

"We're 8,013," he says. Stop one was the McDonald's. Johnson explained that the area franchise holder didn't think McFarland could sustain the restaurant so he had to persuade the corporation to invest. "We did so well the first year that the franchiser decided to exercise his option. Once McDonald's came, Chevron was willing to locate across the street."

Salinas said the focus on commerce was regrettable. "All I hear is that this study is bad for business. They seem to think that a McDonald's is more important than a child's life."