Shadow of Sickness: Part 1: Community Wants Answers On Cancer Rate

Whoever came up with the saying "good fences make good neighbors" clearly never lived on Bennett Dairy Road.

Here in the Cannons Campground community east of Spartanburg, the yards are not separated by fences. But the quality of the character of the person next door is never in question.

Take Benjamin "Frog" Bennett, for example. At 75 years old, Frog would never let a fence impede him from his daily duty of walking to the house next door to check on Karen Murph.

"She needs somebody and I'm the closest one to her, and I'm retired," says Bennett, "so why shouldn't I look after her?"

The neighbors share more than a cup of sugar. An unfortunate bond binds them. Both lost their spouses to cancer. Frog's Martha died of lymphoma in 2008 at age 73. She fought the disease for 14 years. The last two were the worst.

"When she passed away, she weighed 75 pounds," says Bennett. "If it had been something I could have fought with my hands, it would be different. But I couldn't. I couldn't do anything for her."

Murph knows his feeling of helplessness. Her Tommy lived for only 18 months after developing a brain tumor in 1997 at the age of 44. While he was undergoing treatment, she was also diagnosed with cancer.

"We had always been so healthy," says Murph. "It was so weird how it just hit us both like that. But we weren't the first on this road to get sick."

WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Karen and Tommy Murph moved to Bennett Dairy Road from Landrum in 1990. In this area where most of the surnames are Bennett or Chapman or Arthur, the Murphs stood out. But after their diagnoses with cancer, they knew they were officially part of the neighborhood. The house across the road from them was home to a mother-daughter pair of Chapmans who had survived uterine and breast cancers, respectively. Next door, Frog Bennett's wife was battling lymphoma. Next door to the Bennetts, Fred Arthur was in his final struggle with colon cancer. Next door to Fred Arthur, Ralph and Joyce Arthur were still haunted by the loss of their youngest child, Kimberly, who died in 1975 at the age of 15 with leukemia.

"I will never, ever, ever get over it," says Ralph Arthur, now 80. "I don't care how long I live, I will never get over losing Kim, so young."

The sad pattern continues down Bennett Dairy Road, which stretches just over a mile from Old Converse Road to Bud Arthur Bridge Road. In a door-to-door survey of homes in this small area, WSPA documented 25 cases of cancer, 14 of them fatal, dating back to the Kim Arthur case in '75. The most recent diagnosis was in 2001, a 60-year old man with bone cancer.

"It just makes you wonder why?" asks Frog Bennett. "Why has this particular area had so many deaths?"

That's the question WSPA set out to answer at the onset of this investigation in August 2010, a journey that would lead to some places this community had forgotten about and, ultimately, to a place everyone knows.

NOT A CANCER CLUSTER...

Your first impulse when hearing of a seemingly high number of cancer cases in a limited area is to label it a "cancer cluster". Your second impulse is to take the information to South Carolina's authority on such matters: the Department of Health & Environmental Control. But DHEC spokesperson Adam Myrick quickly informed us the illnesses on Bennett Dairy Road do not constitute a cancer cluster for a number of reasons. The first and foremost being, cancer is common.

"Cancer' is an umbrella term given to a wide variety of diseases of a cellular nature for which there is no cure," says Myrick. "Because of that, you are always going to be able to find a certain level of cancer in every community."

He also points to other factors, such as heredity and lifestyle. Cancer is genetic (many of the families on Bennett Dairy Road and the surrounding area are related). Cancer is more common in people over age 50 (many of the patients in this area are older). And cancer clusters are usually made up of the same type of cancer because of a common environmental factor (such as asbestos causing lung disease).

A true cancer cluster, as defined by DHEC, exists when the number of cancer cases that occur is more than would be expected by chance to occur in a certain location or time period. To determine if this exists, DHEC's South Carolina Central Cancer Registry (To learn more about cancer clusters, click here) conducts what is called a community cancer assessment by looking at the number of cases and deaths that occurred in the zipcode of the area of concern. In fact, SCCCR conducted an assessment of the Bennett Dairy Road zipcode, 29307, in 2002, using data from 1996 to 2000. (1996 is the earliest year that can be studied by SCCCR because that is the first year legislation required hospitals, labs, and doctors' offices to report new cancer incidences to DHEC.) The assessment found there were fewer cancer cases and cancer deaths than expected in 29307, concluding there was no evidence of cancer clustering.

To find out cancer rates in your community, click here.

...OR IS IT?

However, many of the cases documented by WSPA in Cannons Campground were diagnosed prior to 1996. Seeking a second opinion, we took our findings to Dr. Jim Burch, an epidemiologist with the University of South Carolina's Cancer Control Program.

He echoed many of the things DHEC told us regarding cancer clusters. And he told us it's hard to make an assessment without knowing the community firsthand. But he also said three things about our data caught his eye:

1) While the cases are not all the same type of cancer, there are several hematological forms of the disease, including three cases of leukemia and variations of bone cancer. The three leukemia cases are located almost next door to one another.

2) While many of the patients are older, there are several young victims. In 1976, one year after Kim Arthur died of leukemia at age 15, a 17-year old named David Putman was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma in his leg. He died two years later. Also in 1976, 35-year old Loretta Richburg developed a mass in her leg and died four years later. None of these victims were related.

"It does seem unusual to me," said Dr. Burch, looking at a map pinpointing the homes of those afflicted. "A lot of the cancer clusters that have been investigated -- and there have been a lot of them with problems all across America -- started in just the same way."

3) The third thing about our information that struck him as odd was the story of Karen and Tommy Murph -- not the fact that they developed cancer at the same time; Burch says that's not unheard of. But there was a third member of the Murph household affected during the same time period: Petey, the family dog.

"She wasn't even that old," says Karen. "She just had these big knots come up on her. (The veterinarian) said she had tumors."

The dog died of cancer just before Tommy Murph succumbed to the tumor in his brain.

"That's unusual," says Dr. Burch. "Pets can serve as sentinels for situations where there might be an environmental contaminant."

CONTAMINATED?

If there was a contaminant in the environment on Bennett Dairy Road, Karen believes she knows how it entered her household: through the well in her backyard. Most of the homes in this area were on private wells until the mid-to-late 1990s. Karen says her water tasted awful.

"It was just so doggone strong, it just about made me sick to my stomach," says Karen.

She says she stopped drinking the water and refused to let her son do so. Tommy kept drinking it, and so did Petey the dog. But Karen says she did enjoy taking long baths in the tub.

"I was the kind that would just get in there and soak for hours," she says.

The disease she was diagnosed with in 1997 was anal cancer.

After undergoing radiation treatment, the cancer went away. But she says it came back in 2005 in another part of her body and is now in her brain. She says her doctor recently gave her six months to live, but she doesn't accept it.

"I'm fighting it and I'm gonna win it, by doggies," says Karen. "i'm gonna fight with everything I can."

Frog Bennett says he never had a problem with the way his well water tasted. But another neighbor, Corinne Dillard, says she did. She says it started tasting strange in the 1970s.

"Everybody in my family just started getting sick," says Dillard, 79.

She says over the years, they had their water tested three times and each time it was contaminated. She couldn't remember with what it was contaminated, but she says she remembers what her doctor said when she showed him the test results.

"He told us not to use the water, not to even take a bath in it," says Dillard.

That was the year before her husband died of heart trouble. Dillard says shortly before his death, doctors found a cancerous tumor in his throat.

RECENT TESTS COME BACK CLEAN...SORT OF

As part of this investigation, WSPA paid a private lab, Rogers & Callcott, to test water samples drawn from six wells in the community, including Karen Murph's inactive well and two active wells. Three of the samples came back with high levels of acetone, but the lab determined that's because the bottles used by Clemson University researchers to collect the samples were pre-rinsed in acetone. There were no suspicious levels of any other volatile organic chemicals.

These results were not a surprise. Volatile organics break down rapidly in the environment. And ground water is constantly moving.

"Test performed today don't tell us what was in those wells 20 or 30 years ago," says Dr. Burch.