'Cancer cluster'
The concerns at La Quinta Middle School aren't uncommon. Every year, more than 1,000 suspected cancer clusters are reported to state health departments, according to the American Cancer Society. But those investigations almost never reveal a true cancer cluster with a specific environmental cause, experts say.
True cancer clusters are defined by several factors. First, researchers must find a greater-than-expected number of cancer diagnoses among a specific group of people in a defined geographic area, taking into account individuals' ages, genders and ethnicities. Generally, affected individuals must have the same kind of cancer — not a wide range of different cancers, as is the case at La Quinta Middle School.
Cancer isn't a single disease, but rather an enormous range of distinct medical conditions, Mack said. And most of those conditions have different causes, he said.
"There are some causes which cause multiple cancers, but almost all have different patterns of occurrence," Mack said. "When we think about clusters, almost always there's no such thing as a cluster of multiple different kinds of cancers."
The reality, experts say, is that nearly half of all men and more than one-third of all women in the United States will be diagnosed with cancer during their lifetimes. And with odds like those, it's common to see elevated cancer rates among relatively small groups, like the population of a middle school.
Bowman used the analogy of people shooting holes into the side of the barn. Even if they aren't aiming at anything in particular, Bowman said, some holes will end up closer together than others by pure chance.
"Someone can draw a bull's-eye around the cluster of random shots, to make it look like the shots were aimed here," he said.
Even if a cancer cluster did exist at La Quinta Middle School, it would be difficult if not impossible to prove it. There have only been a handful of cases, experts say, where investigators found a clear environmental cause for a higher-than-expected number of cancers.
"The chances that you'll ever find anything are really remote, but that doesn't mean this stuff doesn't happen," said Craig Steinmaus, an epidemiology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "So we hate to ignore people who say there's a cancer cluster, but the possibility you'll do an investigation and it'll lead to something is pretty remote."
Local activists who believe there's a cancer cluster at La Quinta Middle School have pointed to the fact that the school's alumni are relatively young, and that several have been diagnosed with rare cancers.
But any sizable group of people with different types of cancer, Mack said, will include some individuals with rare diagnoses, simply because there are so many different kinds of cancer. And it's also surprisingly common for young people to suffer from cancer. About 70,000 people between the ages of 15 and 39 are diagnosed with cancer in the United States each year, according to the National Cancer Institute.
"Because you don't think of young people and cancer in the same breath, it's more surprising to people to know about that," Mack said.
In that context, the number of La Quinta Middle School students who have been diagnosed with cancer over the past quarter-century — at least 37, according to Marks — isn't nearly as shocking. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 8,000 students have attended the school since its founding, so even if 50 of them have been diagnosed with cancer, that would still be just a 0.6 percent cancer rate.
'All he has is fear'
Those numbers aren't likely to provide much comfort to the La Quinta Middle School families impacted by cancer.
Lacroix, who had his left leg amputated, said the school district needs to do more to investigate the cancer cases, whatever their cause might be. He still lives in La Quinta, and he said he won't send his five-year-old daughter or three-year-old son to the school unless something changes.
"If there's something wrong, fix it. Honestly, that's what I want," Lacroix said. "If it saves one kid from going through what I had to go through at that age, it would be worth it."
The concerns over La Quinta Middle School were reignited earlier this year when Marks heard from Milham that about a dozen people who attended La Quinta Middle School had been diagnosed with cancer. Marks, who owns a home in Indian Wells, said she reached out to a KESQ reporter.
KESQ's story, which aired last month, presented a largely uncritical view of Milham's "dirty electricity" hypothesis and did little to scrutinize the idea that a cancer cluster exists at the school. KESQ also asked viewers who had attended or worked at La Quinta Middle School, and had later been diagnosed with cancer, to contact Marks. Soon, the list of former students and teachers with cancer grew to more than 60, Marks said.
KESQ News Director Bob Smith didn't respond to requests for comment on the station's reporting.
A perennially unsuccessful La Quinta political candidate, Robert Sylk — chairman of the Concerned Citizens of La Quinta — has taken up the "cancer cluster" cause as well. According to Marks, Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin has also asked his office to look into the allegations.
But even though the fears of "dirty electricity" and a "cancer cluster" are informed by fringe science, they've had real impacts on La Quinta Middle School. Parents have pulled students from the school, and teachers are concerned some parents will be afraid to send their kids to the school in future years.
Former students and teachers are clearly sincere in their belief that the school caused their cancers, several current teachers told The Desert Sun. But while current teachers are sympathetic to anyone impacted by cancer, they're frustrated that fringe science and long-debunked claims have once again brought their school under the microscope.
"Today, I had a kid in tears because he believes that the school's safe, and he loves the school. But his parent said, 'Just in case,'" and had him transferred to another school, said Laura Spradlin, who teaches language arts and journalism.
Rutherford, the district's superintendent, was particularly upset that members of Marks' and Sylk's groups handed out fliers to students and parents at the school last month. The fliers claimed that "THE DISTRICT IS NOT PROTECTING YOUR CHILDREN AT LQMS AND YOU SHOULD BE OUTRAGED!"
As far as Rutherford is concerned, the fliers were little more than fear-mongering. And he believes Milham is ultimately responsible.
"In his efforts to find respect for his unsubstantiated research — as impassioned and well intentioned as they may be — he is dragging children and families into his argument," Rutherford said. "This is an adult conversation, and he needs to keep it in that venue. All he has is fear, and he's pandering and hurting people."
'What we will not do is pander to fear'
Local activists have asked school officials to outfit classrooms with so-called Graham-Stetzer filters, which are produced and sold by the same companies that market Graham-Stetzer meters. But there's no evidence in the scientific literature that the filters neutralize "dirty electricity," as their manufacturers claim they do.
"We have not found any problem to be solved, and so what we will not do is pander to fear and install devices that are not scientifically based to try to appease some sense of false concern," Rutherford said.
Local activists point out that in 2007, an official from the California Department of Public Health said in a letter to district officials that the filters "would seem to be the most straightforward way of dealing with the teachers' concerns." But that official, Raymond Neutra, told The Desert Sun in an email that he was simply applying the "precautionary principle." Even though it wasn't clear that installing the filters would have any health benefits, he said, doing so would have calmed the teachers' anxieties.
School district officials have now asked John Morgan — who conducted the initial study of teacher cancers for the California Cancer Registry — to do a new study, this time looking at cancer rates among middle school-aged kids living in the school's ZIP code, going back to the school's founding. School officials hope the study, which should be ready by the end of the summer, will put the "cancer cluster" fears to rest once and for all.
In the meantime, it seems inevitable that some parents will continue to wonder whether La Quinta Middle School is safe.
Sant, who lives in Indio, said she made sure not to send her 10-year-old son to the school. But while she believes the school might be to blame for her Wilms tumor, she said it's hard to know with any certainty.
"Where there's smoke, there's fire ... it feels dirty," she said. "But do I know for sure? I don't."