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  3. Community cancer dusters are viewed quite differently by citizen activists and by epidemiologists. Environmentalists and concern

Community cancer dusters are viewed quite differently by citizen activists and by epidemiologists. Environmentalists and concern

admin2013-10-17  31
问题     Community cancer dusters are viewed quite differently by citizen activists and by epidemiologists. Environmentalists and concerned local residents, for instance, might immediately suspect environmental radiation as the culprit when a high incidence of cancer cases occurs near a nuclear facility. Epidemiologists, in contrast, would be more likely to say that the incidences were "inconclusive" or the result of pure chance. And when a breast cancer survivor, Lorraine Pace, mapped 20 breast cancer cases occurring in her West Islip, Long Island, community, her rudimentary research efforts were guided more by hope—that a specific environmental agent could be correlated with the cancers—than by scientific method.
When epidemiologists study clusters of cancer cases and other noncontiguous conditions such as birth defects or miscarriage, they take several variables into account, such as background rate (the number of people affected in the general population) , duster size, and specificity (any notable characteristics of the individual affected in each case). If a cluster is both large and specific, it is easier for epidemiologists to assign blame. Not only must each variable be considered on its own, but it must also be combined with others. Lung cancer is very common in the general population. Yet when a huge number of cases turned up among World War II shipbuilders who had all worked with asbestos, the size of the cluster and the fact that the men had similar occupational asbestos exposures enabled epidemiologists to assign blame to the fibrous mineral.
    Although several known carcinogens have been discovered through these kinds of occupational or medical clusters, only one community cancer duster has ever been traced to an environmental cause. Health officials often discount a community’s suspicion of a common environmental cause because citizens tend to include cases that were diagnosed before the afflicted individuals moved into the neighborhood. Add to this is the problem of cancer’s latency. Unlike an infectious disease such as cholera, which is caused by a recent exposure to food or water contaminated with the cholera bacterium, cancer may have its roots in an exposure that occurred 10 to 20 years earlier.
    Do all these caveats mean that the hard work of Lorraine Pace and other community activists is for nothing? Not necessarily. Together with many other reports of breast cancer clusters on Long Island, the West Islip situation highlighted by Pace has helped epidemiologists lay the groundwork for a well-designed scientific study.
Activists may mistakenly consider a particular incidence of cancer as part of a community cluster despite the fact that______.
选项 A、the affected individual never worked with any carcinogenic material
B、the cancer was actually caused by a long ago exposure
C、the size of the cluster is too small to be meaningful
D、the cancer actually arose in a different geographic location
答案D
解析 D意为：癌症是在不同地区产生的。第一段提到，当一个社区出现患癌症群体时，公民中的社会活动分子(根据上句当属于citizen activist的范围)与流行病学的看法经常产生分歧。
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