Cancer Wars

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Arizona
TUCSON WEEKLY
Cancer Wars
An abnormal number of kids in Sierra Vista are getting leukemia. Why
does the government insist that it's probably just a coincidence?
By Renee Downing
February 12, 2004

One Sunday night in October 2001, Dale and Kelley Durkit took their
2-year-old daughter Jessica to the emergency room at Sierra Vista
Regional Center for festering spider bites on her foot.

The same brown recluse spider had apparently bitten her several times.
They had just been at church, where someone had told Kelley about a good
pediatrician. They'd been reluctant to have the bites treated by the
pediatrician she had been seeing. He'd been dismissing their worries
about the little girl's bruising and listlessness for months.
Fortunately, the new pediatrician agreed to meet them at the medical
center, and they took her in.

Sitting at the family's kitchen table two years later, Kelley winces as
she recalls the last few hours before their lives changed. "The doctor
looked at her and said, 'There's something very wrong with her. She
needs to go to Tucson, to UMC (University Medical Center), tonight.
Right now.'"

"I rode up with her, and Dale took Cody (Jessica's older brother) home
and stayed with him," Kelley says. "At the hospital, they put her in
this crib like a metal cage. I stood there rubbing her back until I
couldn't stand any more and lay down on the cot." (Kelley was six months
pregnant.)

"And then, it seemed like the next minute, it was morning, and there
were three or four doctors in the room and one was saying, 'Your
daughter has leukemia.'"

Kelley continues. "I said, 'You must be joking.' And he said, 'Believe
me, I wouldn't joke about something like this.'

"I fell apart."

SIERRA VISTA HAS A CANCER cluster. Children are getting sick in the
booming military town 70 miles southeast of Tucson, and nobody really
knows why. Since 1997, 12 Sierra Vista children have been diagnosed with
acute childhood leukemia, about 8 more than expected in a total
population of about 40,000. One of those children is dead; the others
are in treatment or in remission. The town's leukemia rate is three
times what it should be.

This article can be viewed at:
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Currents/Content?oid=oid:53523

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