Don’t Go Back to Northvale?
So is there an “autism cluster” in a certain town in New Jersey which just happens to be the state with the highest prevalence rate of autism (1 in 94)?
No more, perhaps, than in any other town in the Garden State.
Back in June of 2007, it was reported that 14 out of 42 children born since 1997 to teachers at a special education school in Northvale, had “disabilities ranging from autism to muscular degeneration.” This finding immediately led to proclamations that there was an “autism cluster” in Northvale, which is in highly populated Bergen County and just over the border from New York state. The special ed school was housed in a long-since closed Catholic school, St. Anthony’s, and a St. Anthony’s Task Force was initiated by the Deirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology®, at Hackensack University Medical Center (HUMC). (Yes, Deirdre Imus who has something of an “environmentally-hued,” as in a green, as in a green cleaning products agenda, and one which I’m anticipating hearing a lot more about now that Imus has been formally enrolled as a lobbyist for HUMC as of late last year.)
In late December 2007, a study conducted on behalf of the Newark Archdiocese, which owns the St. Anthony’s site, ““found nothing unusual with the property,” while the Bergen Record further reports that New Jersey’s Department of Health and Senior Services “also found no abnormalities after completing a walk-through to evaluate the building”; and that the “preliminary results of air quality tests” conducted by the Northvale school district have found “nothing unusual.”
On Monday, the Bergen Record reported that Dr. Walter Zahorodny, director of the New Jersey Autism Study and assistant professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, wants to conduct another research study to determine the autism rate among children of employees at the Northvale school. Dr. Zahorodny wants to question all 515 of the employees who worked at the school site in the past 10-15 years. Only 46 of those 515 employees responded to a letter from the Northvale school district.
In other words, the so-called “autism cluster” at Northvale is based on responses from only 46 out of 515 employees at the site—-from only a small percentage, a small and perhaps self-selected “cluster” of employees.
It will be interesting to see if the second study about Northvale is carried out and what the results will be (and it might be well to keep this comment in mind).
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POSTED IN: Education, Environment, New Jersey, Vaccines
3 opinions for Don’t Go Back to Northvale?
Club 166
Jan 22, 2008 at 3:37 pm
When I first saw the title of today’s post, the first thing that came to me was the R.E.M. song “Don’t go back to Rockville”.
With the recent brouhaha of Autism Speaks silencing an autistic parody website, it might be fun to come up with a parody song titled “Don’t go back to Northvale”.
Joe
Kristina Chew, PhD
Jan 22, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Don’t go back to Northvale, don’t go back to Northvale, don’t go back to Northvale,
Waste another year…..
Cliff
Jan 23, 2008 at 4:07 am
Ah… well. It’s fascinating that this was considered, especially given how self-selecting it is (an awfully specific population, one could say). I’d be interested in hearing the more complete study, though I will admit that I am pretty sure that a cluster that implicates the environment and not the special education environment (”Anyone try to check the air vents at the Autism Speaks convention? There’s an awful lot of parents of autistic kids there…”) isn’t really there, but I could be surprised.
Cliff
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