A Boston-area hospital is stumped by a medical mystery: why five of its nurses, who all work on the same floor, have brain tumors. All five nurses from the fifth-floor maternity unit at Mass General Brigham's Newton-Wellesley Hospital have benign tumors—two of them being meningioma, the most common type, reports NBC News. Six other staffers from the same floor have other, unspecified medical issues. Officials at the hospital say they've looked further into the phenomenon by analyzing the water supply, disposable masks, and the nurses' exposure to X-ray machines, which were all ruled out as being the cause.
Construction at the hospital, pesticides, and cleaning products were also analyzed, as was a pharmacy on the floor below the maternity unit that processes chemotherapy treatments, per People and a news release. Still, "we can confidently reassure our dedicated team ... and all our patients that there is no environmental risk at our facility," hospital administrators say. The Massachusetts Nurses Association, however, says nurses on other floors have come forward with issues as well, and that it isn't satisfied every stone has been overturned to get answers, noting it will carry out its own investigation.
"The hospital only spoke to a small number of nurses, and their environmental testing was not comprehensive," a union spokesperson said in a statement. "The hospital cannot make this issue go away by attempting to provide a predetermined conclusion." The American Cancer Society spells out on its site the criteria needed to designate such a happening as a cancer "cluster," but it also notes that "nearly 4 out of 10 people in the United States will develop cancer during their lifetimes. So, it's not uncommon for several people in a relatively small area to develop cancer around the same time." (More nurses stories.)
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