Families Against Cancer & Toxics

by Bryant Furlow
Epi Medical News & Expose

The activist who discovered evidence that the Fallon, Nevada childhood leukemia cluster was accompanied by an adult brain cancer cluster, has himself died of brain cancer.

Floyd Sands, 56, whose daughter was one of three children to die in the Fallon childhood leukemia cluster, died of brain cancer May 29 in Pennsylvania. Stephanie was diagnosed and died in Pennsylvania after having grown up in Fallon.

Fifteen children and young adults in the rural Navy air base and tungsten smelter community were diagnosed with leukemia between 1999 and 2003. Another boy had been diagnosed in 1997. Other children were diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma, brain cancer and bone cancer, but these cases were not considered by health authorities to be part of the more pronounced
leukemia cluster.

The odds of the leukemia cluster being due to chance alone were calculated to be 1 in 232 million by state and University of California epidemiologists.

After losing his daughter Stephanie, 21, to leukemia in 2001, Sands became frustrated with the slow pace of state and federal health agencies’ investigations into the Fallon cluster. Sands came to believe the state and federal investigations in Fallon were “inconclusive by design," meant to protect powerful economic and military interests rather than to identify the roots of the cluster.

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