1st National Disease Cluster Conference This Fall

A seven-year old coalition of scientists, activists and health professionals are hosting the nation's first Disease Cluster Conference in Washington D.C. September 12-14th to provide a forum for networking and information sharing among the growing number of people doing work around what appear to be dense concentrations of specific illnesses that may or may not have environmental causes. According to the National Disease Cluster Alliance, "this networking opportunity is not just the conference itself, but also the conference planning process, which will purposely be longer than usual in order to give planning participants an opportunity to interact on issues with low emotional content before broaching more controversial topics. An explicit goal is to build trust among the various stakeholders of disease cluster response." You can find out more about the Conference at the group's website here. A disease cluster is defined by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as “an unusual aggregation, real or perceived, of health events that are grouped together in time and space and that is reported to a public health department." The NDCA says " It’s estimated that every year there are approximately 1,000 public requests for investigations into suspected cancer clusters. This staggering figure does not even include cluster concerns about diseases and conditions other than cancer, such as autism, birth defects, multiple sclerosis, or Parkinson’s disease."