A mystery is taking place at a high school in the USA where nearly 100 people have fallen ill with brain tumours, and one ex-student who survived is on the hunt for answers.
Cancer survivor Al Lupiano is just one of 94 former staff and students at Colonia High School in New Jersey that have developed ‘extremely rare’ tumours.
To this date, no-one knows why they’ve developed the malignant tumours, all we know is that they all went to the same school in the Woodbridge Township School District before receiving their diagnoses.
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50-year-old Lupiano has vowed that he won’t stop until he finds out what has happened.
“I will not rest until I have answers,” he told the NJ.com and the Star-Ledger.
“I will uncover the truth.”
Lupiano has personal reason to be involved as well.
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On top of being a survivor himself, he also lost his sister to the disease last February, she was 44-years-old.
On her deathbed, Lupiano made a promise to her that he’d work out what is going on at Colonia.
Now, his efforts have borne fruit and local officials have ordered investigation in whatever is going on.
John McCormac, the Mayor of Woodbridge, said: “There could be a real problem here, and our residents deserve to know if there are any dangers,
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“We’re all concerned, and we all want to get to the bottom of this. This is definitely not normal.”
So, they’re planning to perform some radiological assessments across the whole of the 28 acre school campus, and will be testing samples of the air about the premises to see what they can turn up.
Lupiano got a brain tumour in the 1990s when he was 27, but successfully recovered.
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Then, his wife – who also attended the school – was diagnosed with a rare tumour last year.
On the same day, his younger sister learned about her illness.
Lupiano became convinced that it was something to do with the school and started a Facebook group, where he has since gathered 94 names of people connected to the school who have developed similar illnesses.
Diagnoses include: “Several types of primary brain tumours, including cancerous forms like glioblastoma and noncancerous yet debilitating masses such as acoustic neuromas, haemangioblastomas and meningiomas.”
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Dr Sumul Raval, a top neuro-oncologist, said: “To find something like this … is a significant discovery,
“Normally speaking, you don’t get radiation in a high school … unless something is going on in that area that we don’t know,”
Lupiano now believes that the cause could be ionising radiation.
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He told CBS News: “What I find alarming is there’s truly only one environmental link to primary brain tumours, and that’s ionising radiation.
“It’s not contaminated water. It’s not air. It’s not something in soil. It’s not something done to us due to bad habits.”
The investigation will aim to discover if there is anything at the school or the site that could have caused all of these illnesses.
Lupiano has also claimed that he believes some soil from the nearby Middlesex Sampling Plant, which was used in the Manhattan Project to store and pack uranium ore for development of atomic bombs, could have ended up at the school.
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Colonia has about 1,300 students at the minute, and they’re understandably ‘anxious’ about what’s possibly happening.
Mayor McCormac said: “We are looking at possible things that we can do between the town and school, and they said they will look at anything we come up with.”
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Tom Wood