By David Taylor / Managing Editor
They came from everywhere: Baytown, Highlands, North Shore, Atascocita, Kingwood and all corners of Crosby seeking answers concerning the new designation of the area as a cancer cluster. A recent report from the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) designated a 250-square mile area of east Harris County as a cancer cluster and residents want answers.
Texas Health and Environment Alliance last Monday night hosted the second of two public meetings at a packed Crosby Community Center to present information they had learned from requesting the study conducted by the Texas DSHS.
There were representatives from Harris County Pollution Control and Pct. 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey’s office, but no others showed up including the DSHS who was invited.
“We (THEA) requested that study, and for the year that we worked with the state agency, they told us that they would come to the communities and do outreach with us,” said Jackie Medcalf, executive director and founder of THEA.
“When we scheduled the meetings a couple of months ago for this month, we invited them, and they blanket declined to come to either of the two community meetings.” To represent the absent agency, a table at the front with red balloons were tied to their chairs.
“Why did we request this study? We’ve been a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization now for 10 years and we strive to protect public health and the environment from the harmful effects of toxic waste,” Medcalf told everyone.
“We are not the government. We are not a law firm. We are apolitical. My background is in environmental science and environmental geology. We’re funded by private donations and grants,” she said.
Medcalf told her personal story of founding the organization out of necessity.
“I learned that my family lived in between four superfund sites, and my health at the time, was failing horribly,” she said.
She studied her own water and her body for heavy metals and discovered “crazy” thing on their property and in her body.
“I discovered that I had 21 out of 21 heavy metals often associated with industrial processes in my body,” she said. When she asked how many family members or a loved one were impacted by cancer, it was shocking. Nearly the entire room raised their hands in affirmation.
It was then that she and her family teamed up with residents in Highlands to work together to see the remediation of the San Jacinto River Waste Pits.
“So, a cancer cluster is a greater than expected number of cancer cases in a group of people in a specific time period in a specific geographic area. A couple of things are important to know about the bones of this study. When someone is diagnosed with cancer, their diagnosis is put in the Texas cancer registry at the place where they reside at the time of their diagnosis,” she explained.
If that person moves away, their diagnosis will not go into the registry in this area.
To combat that, THEA has been collecting health surveys for years with the purpose of finding out about things that are not tracked in a registry like lupus, endometriosis, and other types of cancer that might be concerning to the public.
In February 2024, THEA requested the DSHS to conduct a cancer assessment that would look at 29 types of cancer.
“We requested 22 types of cancer in all ages and seven types of childhood cancer, all based on what we were hearing from the local community,” she said.
Most of the surveys came from the Highlands, McNair, Baytown, and Lynchburg areas. The area was a repeat of an original study conducted and chosen by DSHS. The area is broken into 65 census tracts or smaller geographic zones.
The study determined that the area had unusually high rates of four specific types of cancer for that study period: leukemia, lymphoma, cervix, and lung and bronchus cancers.
Medcalf said the study did not seek to understand the cause of the cancers.
“We knew that going into the study,” she said.
But now she had a huge area to consider and find resources to get the word out to the public about the designation.
The area is home to 330,000 people and its in one of the fastest growing parts of Harris County. Its also the source of most of the regions drinking water.
The area has five designated superfund sites.
“It is ridiculous that our government and the polluters have not cleaned them up, and that’s really what we focus on, the sites, the old sites that are impacting our communities today,” she said.
“We know that many people have fished and swam in the water where the San Jacinto River Waste Pits are and there’s been a fish consumption advisory on the local waterways for over 30 years, and the advisory only began in 1990 because that’s when they started testing,” she explained.
Some elected officials were not notified by the DSHS about the cancer cluster designation and have since drafted letters to the state health department.
Medcalf said her disappointment with the study was a lack of breaking down the numbers to individual census tracts which would give much more detail and tell the story of cancer rates.
In Highlands alone, they discovered that the rate of childhood retinoblastoma was 16.4 times the state average.
Now the organization is asking for the data on a community-by-community basis in hopes of helping the community find answers.
Ron Burnett and his wife just moved to Crosby in March of last year from Fort Worth.
“This is a nightmare,” he said. “We thought this home in Lake Shores would be our forever home and now this.”
Burnett said his builder said nothing to them about superfund sites or waste pits in the area.
“We’re wondering if it’s affecting our drinking water and do we need to get a whole new water filtration system,” he said.
“These were things we weren’t planning on,” he said.
The entire meeting was recorded and can be found on their website at txhea.org.
“We’re going to stay and fight. We listened to the man who lost his son to cancer and is now fighting cancer himself and I’m thinking those responsible should be in a class-action lawsuit,” Burnett said.
Ron Burnett and his wife live in Lake Shores and had questions about the newly designated cancer cluster that includes Crosby.
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