Today's edition of the Ottawa Citizen devotes 4,000 words to the rare, often-deadly cancer for which Ryan Lucio was being treated at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario.
The four-year-old Saultite was undergoing treatment for neuroblastoma (a childhood cancer that usually appears in 60 Canadian children a year) when he received what hospital officials acknowledge was a large accidental overdose of the experimental drug Interleukin II.
As a result, Ryan died.
The article reveals how:
- in the nine months after Aug. 1, 2001, eight cases of neuroblastoma were treated at the Ottawa cancer hospital, compared to three new cases diagnosed in 2000, five in 1999, and just one in 1998.
- three of the young patients recently diagnosed are "virtually neighbours."
- some parents are fearful that an environmental toxin somewhere in the Ottawa region has resulted in a neuroblastoma 'cluster' there.
- the hospital's chief of pediatric hematology and oncology is insisting the neuroblastoma patients have no common element of exposure, but she also concedes that no one's studied their backgrounds.
- the eight Ottawa cases and one from Sault Ste. Marie are not considered a unusually high number - most so-called cancer 'clusters' reported by the news media turn out to be random occurrences.
- Ryan Lucio was not probably part of any Ottawa cluster, because he was transferred to Ottawa because of a bed shortage at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.
- another young Ottawa-area patient, Ryan Carroll, was given an overdose of Interleukin II, but survived
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