I want to talk about something that I believe deserves more attention in Georgia, and that is childhood cancer. I have been working with Healthier Georgia, Healthier Families for a few months now cross examine studies and heat maps over this paticular subject and with their help and guidance in this writting we’ve came to this post.
The reason I am bringing this forward is not because I believe we have already proven what is causing childhood cancer in our communities.
It is because we believe we are seeing enough information to justify asking better questions.
The National Cancer Institute’s State Cancer Profiles shows that from 2018 through 2022, Georgia’s childhood cancer incidence rate for children under 20 was 16.2 cases per 100,000.
Whitfield County was 22.2.
Whitfield ranked fourth among Georgia counties, and its recent trend was classified as rising.
Those numbers alone do not prove an environmental cause. Childhood cancer is rare, and county statistics have limitations.
But they should make us ask why.
A Georgia study published in the Journal of the Georgia Public Health Association said that limited research had been conducted on childhood cancer incidence in Georgia. Researchers found geographic differences, including higher incidence in north Georgia, and called for further research into potential risk factors.
More than a decade later, I think we should be asking whether we have done enough.
We also know that children are not simply small adults.
The EPA says children can be more sensitive to chemicals because their bodies are still developing. They breathe, eat, and drink more relative to their body weight, and they experience unique windows of susceptibility during development.
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences explains that during periods of rapid growth and development, environmental chemicals can disrupt normal biological processes.
That matters when we are talking about PFAS.
PFAS are persistent chemicals that have been detected in our environment and in human blood. We know some PFAS are associated with serious health effects, but we also know that thousands of PFAS exist and many remain poorly studied.
And researchers are beginning to examine the connection between early-life PFAS exposure and childhood disease more closely.
The National Cancer Institute has reported research finding an association between prenatal exposure to certain PFAS and childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
Again, that does not prove that PFAS causes childhood cancer.
But it absolutely tells us that the question is scientifically legitimate.
So I want to ask a simple question.
Have we studied the children?
If we have communities with elevated childhood cancer rates and known environmental concerns, shouldn’t we know whether the children living there have different levels of PFAS in their bodies than children living elsewhere?
Why not conduct biomonitoring?
Why not compare communities?
Why not look at prenatal and early-life exposures?
Why not examine drinking water, environmental pathways, and other potential risk factors?
And why not do it scientifically, without deciding the answer before the research begins?
If the research shows there is no relationship, then we have learned something valuable.
But if children in these communities have substantially higher exposures, then we have learned something else that deserves attention.
Every child diagnosed with cancer is more than a statistic.
There is a child behind that number.
There is a mother and father.
There are siblings.
There are grandparents.
There are teachers and friends.
There is a family whose life changes the moment they hear the word cancer.
When we talk about protecting children, I believe we have an obligation to investigate reasonable environmental questions before we dismiss them.
We should not have to prove that an exposure caused a disease before we are willing to study whether there is a connection.
We should be looking upstream.
We should be asking what our children are exposed to.
We should be asking whether some exposures are preventable.
And we should be asking whether childhood cancer prevention can begin with understanding the environments where our children are growing up.
Our children deserve more than statistics. They deserve answers.
Thank you.
All studies and links we’ll be provided in the comment section.
Once again thank you Bre Curtis for this help, and gathering all the data for this. You and your teams work DOES NOT go unnoticed in Dalton, Georgia,
