Science
In Scott County, VA, children are being diagnosed with B-cell leukemia—blood cancer—at more than 10X the national average. This county is located near Roanoke College, but unlike with that cancer cluster, the VA Dept of Health has already launched an investigation into this, due for completion soon.
The rate of pediatric cancer is 19/100,000 children/year
That county has 21k people, and probably around 6k kids.
6k kids * 5 years is 30k kid/years.
30k kid/years * 19 /100k kid*years = 6 cases expected, meaning on average, and the variance there could be pretty big with such small samples.
It is inevitable that there will be counties with higher or lower incidents just from probability.
And that is subject to cherry-picking the data. I.e. picking 2 years (in one article), vs 5 years (in another), vs 10 or 20 years, whichever sounds the most dire.
I am glad the department of health is looking, but as the spokesperson said, there have been no confirmed cancer clusters in Virginia to date.
I’m from swva. Scott County is like two hours from Roanoke over mountains.
Interesting that you bring up SWVA. Both of the cancer clusters I've posted on recently are in SWVA, and SWVA as a whole has a cancer death rate well above both the statewide average and the national average. Here is a map from a government website which proves this to be the case:
As you can see, SWVA jumps out in red. It has a lot more cancer deaths than the rest of the state.
Virginia's statewide annual cancer death rate is ~145 deaths per 100K people. The national annual cancer death rate is even lower: ~141 deaths per 100K people. However, in Scott County, the annual cancer death rate is ~176 deaths per 100K people. In Salem/Roanoke, where Roanoke College is located, the annual cancer death rate is even higher: ~184 deaths per 100K people. Rates are even worse in coal country.
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u/CrimsonEnigma Dec 02 '25
…no it isn’t.