Protecting Science and Public Health in Communities – PFOA and Possible Cancer Clusters in the Village of Hoosick Falls,Rensselaer County,New York

Making measurable that which is not measurable often is a critically important responsibility of public health professionals, for example to identify environmental causes of cancer clusters as a valuable step toward addressing them. In epidemiology such associations cannot be measured directly, but they can be inferred probabilistically. The appropriate approach therefore is statistical. Its implementation, however, has been flawed due to an intrinsic conflict between protecting public health vs. protecting the body of scientific knowledge. Science typically is protected via application of the 95-percent confidence criterion, whereas public health must be protected via application of the statistically less demanding precautionary principal. Public health professionals can and must serve both masters. One approach to fulfilling this mandate is exemplified here via evaluation of possible associations between PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) and the incidence of multiple cancer types in the Village of Hoosick Falls, Rensselaer County, New York.