Defence cancer cluster at Kent Street?

I find it amazing how anti-science, anti-medicine, anti-expert thinking, and misinformation thrives in a climate of fear.

To be a cluster of cancers, they need to be all of the same specific type or have a similar pathology.
“Exposure to X increases your risk of one of 45,000 different cancers” is a statement no scientist will ever make, because there is no single cause for every form of cancer.
Risk factors can include lifestyle, diet, environment, genetics, age, etc.

For a clustering to be investigated, the cancers need to have a level of incidence above the norm, and at a level of occurance above statistical chance, and all have something in common prior to the diagnosis of cancer.

Your evidence is anecdotal, and other than saying “These people once worked together and they have cancer, so therefore it must be working together that caused the cancer”, you have no proof.
A similar fallacy would be that when ice cream sales rise, so do child drownings. As more ice cream is sold, the more children drown, so selling ice cream must cause child drowning.

Short of actually coming out and saying that DoD are conspiring against you, you have come out trying to appeal to non-scientists, and assumed that stories and anecdotal evidence are just as good as — if not superior to — controlled scientific studies.
Anecdotal evidence (ie: first-person stories and rumours) must be confirmed with rigorous research in order to ever be validated.

I suspect that if you asked these 12 people that woman worked with (which is probably well below natural population incidence rates) each will tell you something different that they did in that building, or what their personal risk factors are.
Which is why Defence may be doing research. Valid research takes time.
If we listened to everyone’s anecdotes about how “Timmy got cancer and died after he worked on the Tinfoil Hat Project, that Project is what caused his cancer.” instead of asking further questions, medicine would not have emerged from the dark ages, and we’d still be trying to end droughts by rain dancing.

Have some basic understanding of your subject before you tell the experts they’re lying.
Or just go back to emailing around stories of how nutrasweet causes lupus.

I know that building. If you still work in Defence, try searching their intranet and bulletin boards for health information relating to the building’s Defence reference (the internal building name/number). You might find something by searching the publications area of the intranet for official Minutes.

astrojax said :

all that said, i have no knowledge of this kent street

And lets keep it that way… 🙂

The link in the post shows 109 Kent street to be in Deakin.

not to be argumentative, but a cancer cluster is a grouping of like cancers at a statistically significant occurrence above chance – and the cancers must be the same, or related, and must be primary, not metastasised from other organs.

do the facts you know at the moment, and/or the insinuations, conform to these requirements? breast and brain cancers are not like in kind, for instance.

cancer is, unfortunately, very common and so the statistical likelihood of there being a number of people in any one location who present with cancer is not extraordinary.

all that said, i have no knowledge of this kent street (sydney? i guess not – what suburb we talking here? the big telstra joint i know is on black moutnain!) situation and trust it is being appropriately treated by those who need to do so.