A freind of mine has recently been diagnosed with cancer. They caught it pretty early so the prognosis looks good. After 9/11, he spent nearly a year working in the pentagon. I remembered some stories of increased radiation at the pentagon site and that lead me to ask a few questions. Turns out, 8 people in his "pod" had also contracted cancer since 9/11. I didn't ask him how many people were in a pod but I imagine there were quite a few. There was enough however to get them to start wondering if there was a correlation. I have looked into this a bit and I'm no where near the stage of claiming any link between 9/11 and cancer victims. That said, do any of you know of any links between cancer and 9/11?
I have found a few sites that talk about two studies being conducted on the search and rescue dogs. I am putting down the information that I have found to be of interest.
In one study there were 97 dogs studied and that lasted 3 years.
http://www.petroglyphsnm.org/covers/911dogs.html-Snip-
“Approximately 100 of the 300 search and rescue dogs who were deployed to these sites took part in the study. The age of these dogs ranged from 1 to 11 years, with a median age of 5 years. Fifty-five search and rescue dogs who were not deployed were used as a control group.
During the first three years of the study, 15 of the dogs who were deployed died, eight from cancers and seven from a variety of other causes.”
According to this, 8% of the dogs died due to cancer. Is this a large percentage or within the norm for dogs? Is the 7% who died from other causes a normal mortality rate for 5 year old dogs over a 3 year period?
There is also another study that is tracking the health of 24 search and resue dogs over a five year period. This is being offered free by the IAMS company using thier MRI equipment. I have no idea if this study and the first study are related or if they are using the same animals.
In the IAMS test there has been one confirmed case of cancer out of 24 animals which is roughly 4%. This happened in 2004 and no new information is available at thier site. I have no idea if they have added more dogs to thier study or if more have contracted cancer.
In this MSNBC article:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6008978/One of the researchers stated that none of the animals who died in the first and larger study died of lung cancer.
"“We were concerned about respiratory problems ... things like coughing,” Otto said. “There were no cases of lung cancer in the dogs that have died.”And yet, in the second study, Rookie, the only dog to have died, died of lung cancer.
""
The people at Iams said they wanted to save Rookie's life. On Feb. 5, he had surgery and they removed a mass the size of a large lemon. They did chemotherapy, and that went well, using a new drug developed by Pfizer. His last treatment was April 28."
Though all of this, Rookie continued to work part time, when he felt well enough, which was most of the time. But by late June, one of Rookie's eyes was drooping. Tests showed the cancer had spread to his lungs." The cancer had started in Rookie's mouth and then spread to his lungs. Six months after he was diagnosed with cancer, he was dead.
From the same article, "
Stone says it's way too early to tell whether Rookie's cancer was caused by his work at Ground Zero." In the MSNBC article, the researcher also states that “We don’t have any evidence that we can associate (cancer) with their work at 9/11, but it’s still early,”
This is as far as I have gotten in this line. There's not a whole lot more information I can find and was hoping one of you might know more.
One thing that does strike me odd is the fact that they're doing this research on dogs and not people. They state that the dogs are like a "Like a canary in a mine, our dogs will become symptomatic before the human responders, providing an early warning to human health care providers as to what they need to be looking for.” Maybe this is true but how long are they going to wait to see if there's a connection between cancer and 9/11? How many dogs have to die in an allotted time before they start monitoring humans? What we know for sure is that 9 out of 121 dogs have died from cancer since 9/11 and 7 more from other causes not specified. This puts the mortality rate for the SAR dogs at 12.4% to 13.2% over a 3 year period. The mortality rate due to cancer is 6.6% to 7.4%. I have no idea if these numbers are normal for dogs in this line of work but I expect they were all pretty well cared for and about 5 years old. To me, it seems a like a high number given the study grouping but I have nothing to base this assumption only uneducated speculation. Any help you can offer will be appreciated.
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