Fear Stalks East Pennsboro, PA Students

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Fear Stalks East Pennsboro, PA Students

By Jim and Jerry L. Gleason Of The Patriot-News

5-8-2

" I'll be lucky if I get out of this school alive. "

Amber Baer sat on a curb across the street from her high school yesterday,

wondering how long she had to live. Six students have died in the last five

months. Cancer, heart problems, lung ailment. One just collapsed in a hall

and died.

" It's really freaky, " said Baer, a ninth-grader. " I'll be lucky if I get out

of this school alive. "

Fear and angst are high among students at East Pennsboro Area High School

after a series of student deaths in the school district. Four high school

students, a middle school pupil and a kindergarten pupil have died since

Dec. 15.

On Sunday, 17-year-old Jimmy Henry, a junior, died in Holy Spirit Hospital

of a brain aneurysm he had since birth, according to Cumberland County

Coroner Norris, forcing grieving teen-agers to face their own

mortality yet again.

Funerals, prayer services. Crying. Teens huddled together at the local

skating rink, crying about death. Remembering Batdorf, a 13-year-old

student who collapsed in the middle school hall one morning as she went to

her locker. Remembering her in her coffin.

" They said she looked like a little porcelain doll in her white dress, "

Amber Hammett, a seventh-grader, recalled.

Crying in ny's Pizzeria, a popular after-school hangout down the street

from the high school. " It's a hard thing, " said ny, the cook and owner,

who prefers to go by his first name only. " You can't say, 'What's up, what's

going on?' I just let them be.

" I feel I'm in a sci-fi movie. You think it's going to stop, but it just

keeps happening. You want to turn the 'off' button off. "

Death creeps into everything. Even skateboarding, which Andy Huling, an

eighth-grader, had considered an escape from what was happening -- " a

paradise, " he calls it. He was late getting to his locker the day

died, and watched her collapse, watched her fall against the lockers, fall

to the floor.

While he and friend Mike Ardoline skated on worn boards in the parking lot

of the local coin-operated laundry, they talked of her death, and the string

of deaths, trying to find a reason, an answer. Rumors among students have

flown -- everything from tainted air and water to the schools being built

over an old landfill or a sacred American Indian burial ground. A curse.

All Huling knew was that the night after 's death, he couldn't sleep.

" It doesn't make any sense, " he said. " Why would six kids just die in the

same year? "

's sister, , a freshman at East Pennsboro, has wondered that,

too. " In a way, I do believe these deaths are coincidental, " she said.

" However, like everyone else I wonder. Why East Pennsboro? "

Students have gone to counselors and ministers, searching for answers.

" Their peers are dying around them and they are running scared, " said

Celeste Hamilton, a pastoral assistant at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic

Church and president of the West Shore Ministerium. " They feel very, very

vulnerable, and normally someone that age doesn't feel vulnerable at all. "

To Kelchner, a ninth-grader, the deaths are simply a coincidence.

Still, they have shattered the normalcy of life.

" It's changed the way I look at friends -- hoping they're not going to be

the next one to pass out and die, " he said.

Steve Rouzer, a 10th-grader, met Jimmy Henry while working after school at

the Giant in a township strip mall. Rouzer bagged groceries, Henry sold

seafood behind a counter. Rouzer was bagging groceries the day Henry's

family called the store to break the news of his death.

It was hard. " I never had a friend die before, " Rouzer said. His reaction?

A mixture of feelings that is difficult to describe.

" I'm more accepting of death now -- it gets harder and easier all at the

same time, " Rouzer said. " Somebody dies, then you think of all the people

who died. "

Baer thought of all the students who have died, as she sat on the curb

across the street from her school. A few long, flat windows were pushed open

in the brick building, and shades were partially pulled down. On a sign at

the entrance, usually reserved for pep-rally slogans or school

announcements, the staff had written the words, " We will be OK. God bless

our kids. "

She wasn't sure she could deal with another death.

" If someone else dies, " Baer said, " I'm not going to school. "

JIM LEWIS: 255-8479 or jlewis@... JERRY L. GLEASON: 975-9782 or

jgleason@...

Copyright 2002 The Patriot-News. Used with permission.

(There is some low level rumbling that the TMI accident damaged women's eggs

(which they carry from birth) and is causing all of the problems. This

theory is even being discussed by/with the Dauphin County Coroner. There is

no evidence to support this theory as of yet and I doubt there will be. It

is possible, however, that some of the cancer deaths of these children were

caused by TMI -- a rare brain cancer and cervical cancer. There is no direct

evidence to support that theory as of yet, either. A new study published in

the May 14 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

study shows genetic mutations caused by radiation can continue into a third

generation in mice.

Here is a story on it:

Radiation Causes Mutations For Several Generations

By Ed Edelson

HealthScoutNews Reporter

MONDAY, May 6 (HealthScoutNews) -- Open-jawed about an unanticipated finding

and puzzled about its implications for human health, researchers report a

mouse study shows genetic mutations caused by radiation can continue into a

third generation.

The results, appearing in the May 14 issue of the Proceedings of the

National Academy of Sciences (news - web sites), were " totally unexpected, "

says Yuri E. Dubrova, head of the research team.

The finding is " a complete nightmare, " says Dubrova, a reader in genetics at

the University of Leicester in England. " I expected to find nothing in the

grandchildren " of irradiated mice, he says, " but no, they show exactly the

same increase in germ line mutation rate. " Germ line cells are those

involved in reproduction.

The study was actually a double-check of results found in a previous trial,

in which one strain of mice was irradiated with high-energy neutrons,

Dubrova says. " To our surprise, we got a high mutation rate in the offspring

of males. But fission neutrons are known to be a powerful mutagen [something

that causes mutations], so we asked what would happen if we do the same

thing with more well-known X-rays. "

So three strains of mice were exposed to both fission neutrons and X-rays,

and their offspring were studied to see if they had the same mutations as

occurred in the radiation-exposed generation.

" The bottom line is that first, all three strains show the same effects in

the offspring of irradiated males and second, both X-rays and fission

neutrons do the same thing, " Dubrova says.

" The remarkable finding that radiation-induced germ-line instability

persists for at least two generations raises important issues of risk

evaluation in humans, " the journal report says.

No human studies of the effects of radiation exposure on future generations

have been done. The Radiation Effects Research Foundation, a joint

Japanese-American effort looking at the effects of the atomic bombs dropped

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reported in 1991 that a study of 76,625 babies

born to survivors found " no statistically demonstrable increase in major

birth defects considered in total or in any specific type among the children

of atomic-bomb survivors. "

However, it is possible that radiation exposure might increase the risk of

cancer, Dubrova says, stressing this is pure speculation.

" If we can speculate, if children of irradiated parents are unstable [have

inherited mutations], this might create a situation where they have a higher

chance of getting cancer, " he says.

And the concluding sentence of the journal report says " the data raise the

important issue of trans-generational effects of ionizing radiation for

humans, providing, for example, a plausible explanation for the apparent

leukemia cluster near Sellafield nuclear plant. " The plant is in England.

It is an almost unprovable speculation, says B. Setlow, a senior

biophysicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (news - web sites), who

edited the journal paper. Proving that what happened in the laboratory mice

happens in humans would require a study that might last a century, he says.

" Think of how long it would take, following generation after generation, "

Setlow says. " I don't know if we will ever find out if it is acceptable to

extrapolate from mice to men and women. "

The result of the study is " rather surprising, " Setlow says, largely because

" no one has thought of the possibility. When you know the answer, you say,

'Why shouldn't it happen?' But people haven't looked. "

It's possible that even if the same thing happens in humans, health effects

might be limited because " sometimes mutations that are deleterious don't get

transmitted, " Setlow says.

What To Do

The report should not raise doubts about the safety of medical radiation,

because " the kind of doses you get medically do not cause mutations, " Setlow

says.

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