Cancer Rate Increase Confirmed

The Puerto Rico Health Department released data through year 2000 showing that Vieques has experienced an increased incidence in cancer from the already high rates documented in 1989. "We have the cancer mortality data that show it is significantly higher than the average of Puerto Rico," Johnny Rullán announced on September 19. "The number of confirmed cancer cases in Vieques also follows an increasing tendency," he said. The data shows that the island of 9,300 people has an average of 30 to 40 cases of cancer a year.

In mid-October, Miliví Adams, the five-year-old little girl who has come to symbolize all the cancer victims in Vieques went home at her own request, with doctors giving her less than a month to live. Diagnosed with cancer at the age of two, Miliví has been sick most of her short life. Between treatments in the United States, her family came home to Vieques and Miliví would sit and watch the children play at the Peace and Justice Camp or at Camp Miliví, which was named in her honor.

On October 16, the former Puerto Rican Secretary of Health, Carmen Feliciano, admitted that a Navy agency had supplied the Puerto Rico’s software for registering cancer cases. In 1994, the Health Department signed a contract with the Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center to design the Cancer Registry’s software. Rullán says that Feliciano decentralized and dismantled the registry.

But Rullán may not be much better. He announced that Puerto Rico was launching an epidemiological study in Vieques, but at the same time said that "possibly the people of Vieques have something in their genes that is different from the people of Puerto Rico." Dr. Cruz Maria Nazario points out that a dramatic change in the genetic constitution of viequenses is high unlikely. Before the intensification of the bombing in Vieques, their cancer risk was less than in Puerto Rico, and 30 years later it is more than in Puerto Rico."

The epidemiological study has been put in the hands of Dr. Angeles Rodríguez, who says that "the purpose is not to find out whether the Navy is the cause" of the increased cancer rate in Vieques. Another member of the team assigned to the study, Dr. Alvarado Ramy, has no training in cancer research, and said that in 75% to 80% of cancer studies it isn’t possible to show conclusive association between contamination and disease.

The study’s point of departure, says Voz de Vieques, should be that the slightest suspicion that a polluter is harming the health of a group of Puerto Ricans morally obligates the researcher to aggressively explore and attempt to verify that that polluter is not the cause of health problems. And if that cannot be proven, then it is the people who should be protected, not the polluter.

Sources: Puerto Rico Health Department (www.salud.gov.pr); El Vocero, 10/16/02; La Voz de Vieques, 10/15/02; Mayaguezanos con Vieques.