Cancer cluster

State or local health departments will investigate the possibility of a cancer cluster when a claim is filed.

[3] In order to justify investigating such claims, health departments conduct a preliminary review.

At this point, a committee of medical professionals will examine the data and determine whether or not an investigation (often lengthy and expensive) is justified.

[4] In the U.S., state and local health departments respond to more than 1,000 inquiries about suspected cancer clusters each year.

It is a well-known problem in interpreting data that random cases of cancer can appear to form clumps that are misinterpreted as a cluster.

Statisticians examining data for cancer clusters must beware of random coincidences, which seem to form a pattern . [ 5 ] In this randomly generated scatter graph, arcs and patterns appear to exist that have formed only by coincidence.