Study Finds No Specific Cause For Higher Cancer Rates In Napa County
NAPA (CBS SF) -- The mystery of why cancer rates are higher in Napa County than anywhere else in the state has stumped doctors for nearly a decade. But a new report made public Tuesday may offer some answers.
Nadine Willoughby lost a sister to cancer and has beaten the disease herself twice.
"I thought, I will not want to take any chances with this, so I went for the mastectomy," said Willoughby.
She's is the face of a frightening trend in Napa County. It leads the state in age-adjusted cancer rates and is consistently above the state rate for cancer deaths.
"We do not take something like that lightly," said District 3 Supervisor Diane Dillon. "We do not want to dismiss it at all."
On Tuesday, the county presented a report explaining why those rates are so high. The report cited access to good health care and early detection as a reason for high reported rates, not the use of pesticides or mining as some had thought.
"But to say that this one thing is causing the higher incidence of one kind of cancer, theres no documentation to back that up," said Dillon.
So the Napa County Public Health Division has been tasked with keeping track of new numbers and tackling lifestyle issues like obesity that have been linked to cancer. And in the meantime, folks like Willoughby say they'll keep beating the odds.
"Those numbers hit home, yeah. But people do survive," she said.
However, there still is a small group of concerned citizens who were not put at ease by the study. They want health officials to look at incidence rates for Parkinson's Disease and Alzheimer's Disease. There was no word as of Tuesday evening whether Napa County plans to look into numbers for those afflictions.
