More than 100 people who attended a New Jersey high school now have brain cancer

I read this a few weeks ago and thought how on earth does one deal with such a terrible tragedy?

It is obvious, by any statistical analysis, that there is a single common cause. Something went horribly wrong many years ago. And behind that cause is almost certainly liability and therefore provision of treatment or compensation to ease the misery of those affected.

The problem is that tracing the cause is likely impossible. Digging through the past, sending discovery letters, interviewing witnesses, and turning up stones best left alone would cost a fortune and take forever. What always seems to happen is that by the time there's any case, trial and remedy the victims and perpetrators have all died.

For things like this we need national insurance pools. They should be paid into by chemical companies, power providers, mining and transport companies, and all businesses that create external risks.

Of course some will argue that would create negative safety incentives, which is a fair argument, but the idea does not preclude criminal liability too.

Makes me think of the medical device that was scrapped in Mexico, releasing BB sized cobalt 60 pellets into the metal recycling supply chain. They did not melt during the recycling process, and several thousand pellets ended up randomly distributed among 600 tons of steel. Many ended up in rebar, while some made it into table legs that were sold all over North America. The problem was only discovered when a Los Alamos truck took a wrong turn and their Geiger counter detected on that was embedded into a road.

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/01/science/nuclear-spill-at-...

My tin hat is twitching. I live in another state near an Air Force Base. My father was killed by a glioblastoma 3 years ago. My boss was diagnosed with one 3 months after my father died. A friend was diagnosed with one a year after that. Next thing I know, I'm catching wind of stories from nurses and aides about the odd uptick of these things over the last decade. I chalk it up to better detection methods, etc, but there exists a nagging tickle at the back of my mind that someone wittingly or unwittingly made a decision in our area that is resulting in an unforeseen risk of brain tumors.

We have to be careful in this territory, though. It is also possible we are trying to explain shadows that were always there.

I do hope the folks in that area get some real answers, though.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31056262

I brought this up before, but the US government has been known to conduct experiments in regions on people, animals, land.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was one such event.

Examples: https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aids-drugs-tested-on-foster-kid...

https://healthland.time.com/2012/03/23/the-legacy-of-the-cia...

Looks like Woodbridge Township is in a flood-plain that's downriver (on the Rahway River) from a coal ash disposal site (used from 1947 to 1957) which raised concerns in 2016.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20161220172516/http://unionnewsd...]