Health officials may collect dust from Fallon homes

Nevada and federal health officials are considering collecting dust from the homes of children stricken with leukemia in an effort to find a common environmental element that links 12 confirmed cases in Fallon.

A panel of experts last week recommended expanding air, water and soil testing as a means to either find or eliminate environmental triggers that could lead to such a high rate of acute lymphocytic leukemia in children, as old as 19, who were either born or had lived in Fallon, a military and farming town of about 8,000.

State health officials confirmed nine cases of leukemia in 2000, a rate roughly 42 times the cases expected in a town the size of Fallon, 60 miles east of Reno. The remaining three cases were confirmed this year.

State epidemiologist Randall Todd said nine Midwestern states have sampled household dust from the homes of 2,000 childhood leukemia victims; the samples are being analyzed for pollutants such as insecticides and pesticides.

California state health officials are considering testing dust on their own, and Nevada might be able to join the sampling effort, Todd said. "We should be able to tag on without any additional expense," he said Monday.

Simply put, a dust study indicates what people are breathing while inside their homes. Collecting outdoor air samples cannot definitively determine what people might be exposed to; outside air dilutes contaminants, as compared to what concentrates inside homes, Todd said.

James Cizdziel, a senior chemist with UNLV's Harry Reid Center for Environmental Research, said sampling household dust is an excellent idea.

As a University of Nevada graduate student Cizdziel, searching for atomic bomb fallout and pesticides, collected attic dust from Las Vegas homes that date to the 1950s. He found both.

When people clean their homes they rarely dust in the attic unless the family is moving, he said.

Cizdziel discovered that, before gasoline became lead-free, lead also tended to cling to dust particles.

The only hazard Cizdziel worried about was the pulmonary disease known as Sin Nombre, or hantavirus, a deadly virus spread by rodent droppings. To protect himself he wore a dust mask as he climbed across attic beams.

The state also is cognizant of the idea that the childhood leukemias might have begun after people were exposed to a virus, Todd said.

Some experts believe such a virus cannot be directly linked to leukemia, Todd said. The virus that triggered the children's cluster in Fallon might be a common one, such as the human papilloma virus, which is usually harmless until it reaches a susceptible person. The papilloma virus can cause cervical cancer in women.

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