I came back to look at the Cluster link…and North Haven, Connecticut caught my eye.  I wondered how close it was to Newtown.

From the Cluster website:

Researchers have doubled the scope of their investigation into brain cancer cases at a jet-engine manufacturing company and are requesting another two years and an additional $4 million to complete the work. This study was prompted by the deaths of at least several dozen workers from the same rare, very fast-growing form of brain cancer. The study initially had been expected to look at the medical and work records of about 100,000 current and former workers. But that number increased to 200,000 during routine searches of company records, said a biostatistician at the University of Pittsburgh who is conducting a portion of the research. The due-date for the study is 2008, but researchers now want to push back the completion deadline to 2010.

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I looked at the distance between the two cities: about 42 miles…close enough to possibly affect them?

When I looked up Newtown contamination, I found this. <sigh>

These piles are contaminated with high levels of metals including cadmium, lead, tin, chromium, copper, zinc, and nickel, as well as PCBs.

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…the only one missing is mercury, but the article does mention that it was a site of aluminum smelting.

So…you have poisons giving people brain cancer and 40 miles away, you have the toxic soup further messing with brain function, if they were lucky enough not to become sick (at least noticeably sick, i.e., cancer).  But many others will likely suffer from chronic fatigue, low thyroid/adrenal function, ADD, memory loss, and on…and they won’t likely be counted.  It’s sooo much easier to ignore a problem when you only count those most severely affected, and not the overall decline of health of many others….and if someone commits a horrible crime because of those toxins…