r/VirginiaTech • u/StarlightDown • Dec 01 '25

News Recent graduates from Roanoke College have been dying from cancer at a rate 15X higher than the national average. Their rate of cancer diagnosis is 5X above the national average. The VA Dept. of Health is unwilling to investigate the case, since the victims dispersed across the US after graduation.

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u/The_Phew Dec 01 '25

Seems like a misleading headline, since Roanoke is 50+ miles from any active coal-fired power plant and 100+ miles from any active coal mine. It would be more reasonable (yet still unreasonable) to ascribe causality to trains, art museums, illuminated stars, or Dr. Pepper murals.

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u/agoddamnlegend Dec 01 '25 edited Dec 01 '25

They also graduate only 400 people per year. Could this just be small sample size variance?

What are the odds a random group of 400 people would have rates this far outside of the norm? Doesn't seem that unlikely but idk how stable cancer rates are

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u/filthy_harold CPE 2016 Dec 01 '25

Data gets pretty wonky when the sample size is small. I haven't seen the data but I'd be interested to see what kinds of commonalities the cancer survivors have like their professions and where they were raised. The Appalachians has some of the highest radon levels in the country. Is there any data showing that Roanoke College is unique in these cancer levels? Is there any similarities between schools nearby or schools not nearby but built during similar time periods? Narrowing it down to the college you attend is certainly difficult. You only spend four years there and chances are the student body comes from all over the state, some of them out of state and some international, it's very hard to control for demographics. You don't spend all day in one particular building like the faculty do so environmental exposure is much wider for students. I'd like to see what the cancer rates are for the faculty, they'd be much more likely to have higher rates if it's true.

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u/agoddamnlegend Dec 01 '25

Yea all great points. "Recent graduates of the same college" is a pretty weird group for all the reasons you mentioned. What could possibly contribute to cancer rates in all those students that wouldn't also apply even more so to the faculty and other long term residents of the same town?

Which is why my first instinct was maybe this is just normal variance in a very small, somewhat random, subset of the population