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Complaint Filed on Toxic Pollution in Woburn. On this day in 1984, lawyer Jan Schlichtmann filed the first motion in the case made famous by the book and film "A Civil Action." For over a decade, children in Woburn had been falling ill and dying of leukemia in unusually high numbers. The victims' families became convinced that the town's ...
Oct 23, 2023 · A recent article in the Boston Globe announced the EPA’s proposal for a full ban on chemical linked to Woburn leukemia cluster.Trichloroethylene, also known as TCE, has been tied to birth defects, reproductive problems, and to 21 cases of childhood leukemia diagnosed in Woburn from 1969 to 1986.
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May 30, 2019 · The town was Woburn, Massachusetts, ... Between 1969 and 1986, there were 21 cases of childhood leukemia diagnosed in Woburn, including 12 children who died. Just like in Franklin, a mother of a ...
Tests confirmed high concentrations of both organic compounds in two public drinking wells. This was the beginning of community activism and official investigations regarding cancer and environmental hazards in Woburn. By May 1980, 12 cases of childhood leukemia were confirmed in East Woburn, where the population had been drinking from the two ...
- Learning Objectives
- The Woburn Water Supply
- Cancer in Woburn
- Assessing The Health Status of A Community
- Contamination in Wells G and H
- The Leukemia Cluster
- Woburn Health Data Analysis, 1969-1978
- Woburn - Cancer Incidence and Environmental Hazards, 1969 – 1978
- Standardized Rates of Disease
- Data on Environmental Contaminants
After completing this case study the student will be able to: 1. Identify and describe resources available to collect environmental and health data on a community. 2. Describe the properties and major sources of volatile organic compounds, such as TCE, and predict how they behave in environmental media. 3. Collect current data on the toxicity of a ...
Up until the 1960s Woburn's water was supplied from six wells in the vicinity of Horn Pond (wells A-F on the map below on the left). As the population grew, more water was needed; Well G was put into operation in 1964, and Well H was added in 1967. Wells G and H were located in east Woburn in the vicinity of the Aberjona River, shown in greater det...
Anne Anderson and her husband Charles moved to Woburn in 1965. They bought a house in east Woburn where the Aberjona River, really no more than a stream, wound through marshes and what had been farms and orchards. But their lives were changed forever when their son Jimmy was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) in January 1972; Jimmy was...
In order to monitor the health of a population it is necessary to record health related events. The earliest systematic records regarding health status of a community were records of births and deaths that were recorded in Europe beginning centuries ago. Around 1592 the parish clerks in London began recording deaths. In 1662 John Graunt, a founding...
In the spring of 1979 it was discovered that someone had left 184 barrels of industrial waste on a plot of land in northeast Woburn just a half mile from Wells G and H. The barrels were removed before they leaked, but given the proximity to the wells, a state inspector tested water samples from Wells G and H. On May 22 the results showed that both ...
There was widespread concern In the wake of the disclosures about the contaminants found at the old Merrimac Chemical Company and the contamination of Wells G and H with TCE and perc. Reverend Bruce Young, the minister at Trinity Episcopal Church in Woburn, had had many conversations with Anne Anderson about her belief that something in the environ...
On December 21, 1979 the Massachusetts Department of Public Health published the Woburn Health Data Analysis, 1969-1978. The summary of the report stated: And the concluding paragraph said: The aggressive efforts by Reverend Young to find all of the leukemia cases had successfully identified all 12 of the incident leukemias that occurred during thi...
Jimmy Anderson died on January 18, 1981. Five days later the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and CDC released an additional study that and concluded that the incidence of childhood leukemia in Woburn was significantly greater than expected. This study got around the lack of information in the rest of the state by using age- and sex-specif...
As noted earlier, a key question for Woburn was whether or not the community was experiencing an unusually high frequency of leukemia (or other diseases). The strategy for doing this is generally to compare the incidence of a particular disease in a community to the incidence of that disease relative to that in other communities or relative to the ...
Sources of environmental information have improved a great deal since 1972 when Jimmy Anderson was diagnosed with leukemia. Today, when community members or health professionals have suspicions about an environmental contaminant causing health problems, one of the first steps should be to learn about the environmental quality of their community. So...
IV.CANCER MORTALITY STUDY. As mentioned above, this study was undertaken from 1949 – 1968. Of major concern was the from childhood leukemia was 5% in 1950, figures for that time. Much improvement in time. 9 and the 5 year survival Therefore, rate in 1975 one was mortality figures for the 1950s and 1960s, but.
Jan 17, 2016 · The Legacy of Woburn. Though the Woburn story was tragic for the community, it has created a lasting legacy on public health. It was one of the first nationally recognized cancer clusters, and was the catalyst that drove many new scientific studies. Though investigating cancer clusters remains challenging, Woburn provided an opportunity for ...
