Napa County has some of the higher cancer rates among California’s 58 counties and the county Health and Human Services Agency will look for causes that might prove elusive to find.
The grassroots group Napa Vision 2050 brought the issue to the attention of Board of Supervisors on Feb. 2 during a period for public comments. President Dan Mufson said public health concerns can be caused by the careless use of the environment.
“We have particular concerns about airborne toxins due to mining, vineyard and traffic-related emissions,” Mufson said.
County Public Health Officer Karen Relucio said on Thursday that higher-than-average cancer rates can result from a variety of factors. For example, she noted Napa County also has a higher obesity rate than the state average. Health experts link obesity with increased risk for certain cancers.
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“We don’t want to speculate that there’s a certain environmental factor that contributes to cancer rates without looking into the data further,” she said.
The county Health and Human Services Agency will work with the state and at some point will report publicly on the possible factors contributing to Napa County’s cancer rates.
The California Cancer Registry reports that Napa’s cancer incident rate from 2009-2013 was 589.68 cases per 100,000 people, ranking eighth highest among the state.
But the age-adjusted rate of 477.4 was third highest among counties, behind Shasta and Butte and well above the state rate of 417.96. The adjustment allows for more direct comparison among counties, given that cancer rates are higher among older people.
The California Cancer Registry webpage provides cancer rate information for each county over various time frames. From 1990 to 2013, Napa County had an age-adjusted cancer incident rate of 492.09, sixth highest behind Mariposa, Tuolumne, Shasta, Lake and Marin counties.
From 2004-2008, Napa had cancer incident rates well above the state average for prostate, lung-and-bronchus and colon-and-rectum cancers in males and lung-and-bronchus and melanoma cancers in women, a California Cancer Registry fact sheet said.
Go to the California Cancer Registry at cancer-rates.info/ca/ to look up cancer rates for California counties.
In addition, the group Kidsdata.org reported Napa County from 2008-2012 had 22.8 cancer incidents per 100,000 children, the highest rate in the state. That compares to the statewide rate of 17.5 and marks an increase from the county’s 2002-2004 rate of 13.5.
The county will look at whether this rise in local childhood cancers is a trend or a statistical anomaly. Marin, Sonoma, Sacramento and San Mateo counties also saw significant increases.
After his initial Feb. 2 comments, Mufson took up the cancer rate issue again during the public comment period at the Feb. 9 Board of Supervisors meeting. He asked supervisors why the county hadn’t acted on the information his group had provided.
“You are here to protect the health, safety and welfare of your citizens,” Mufson told supervisors. “So please do it.”
The Health and Human Services Agency is looking into the data, Relucio told supervisors later in the meeting. Napa County has seen rises in lung cancer, prostate cancer, kidney and bladder cancer, melanoma and leukemia and lymphoma, she said.
Many of the county’s cancer deaths are linked to lung cancer, breast cancer and gastrointestinal cancers, Relucio said. Many of these deaths are in the city of Napa.
But the county’s Public Health Division doesn’t have the resources to find the causes, Relucio said. The division has turned to the California Department of Public Health’s environmental health investigation branch for help.
She sought to temper expectations.
“There have been studies that suggest in cancer investigations where we’re trying to peg an environmental cause of cancer, it is successful in one out of 500 investigations,” Relucio said.
Napa County will also work with the California Cancer Registry.
Supervisor Keith Caldwell said Napa County once had workers commuting to Mare Island Naval Shipyard, where they could have been exposed to asbestos and toxic materials. But the shipyard closed in 1996.
Relucio said it’s hard to attribute the rise in cancer incidents to past occupations at Mare Island and past industrial uses within the county.
“We know we have the highest percentage of seniors of any Bay Area county,” Supervisor Diane Dillon said. “Does that get factored in here?”
The analysis from the California Department of Public Heath should provide lots of rich information on the cancer topic, county Health and Human Services Agency Director Howard Himes said.
“The more we have information and the more we’re informed about what those potential variables are and put things in context, it will be better for the community, as opposed to potentially not knowing,” Himes told supervisors.
When it’s available, this information will go to the group Live Healthy Napa County and could also be presented to the Board of Supervisors, he said.
Mufson said Thursday he’d like to see the county go further than seeking help from Sacramento without a clearly defined time frame. He’s concerned the county won’t pursue the issue vigorously enough.
“What we’d like to see is a little more urgency by our local government, to conduct some study or commission some study,” he said.
On its website, the California Cancer Registry tackles the idea of cancer clusters. Contaminants in the environment can cause cancer, but play less of a role than most people think, a registry fact sheet says. Everyone lives in environments with carcinogens, and the links between these carcinogens and cancer is complex.
Most scientists say factors such as smoking, diet, age, family history and race play a larger role than the environment in the development of most cancers, it said.
Most cancers related to carcinogens take 10 years to 20 years or longer to develop. In addition, cancers are common, with 51 percent of all California men and 45 percent of all women developing a cancer at some point their lives, it said.