He focuses on the clinical care of children with brain tumors. Five local young people, ranging in age from 5 to 19, have been diagnosed with various central nervous system cancers the past two years. Gururangan has treated all five. Three were diagnosed with pontine glioma, one with medulla blastoma and the other with a spinal cord glioma. Three have died.
Pontine glioma is a brain stem cancer in the pons area of the brain.
There are 200 to 300 cases diagnosed in the United States each year. Medulla blastoma affects about 600 children in the United States each year, and spinal glioma strikes 50 to 100. I am cautious but am willing to support the study, the doctor says. This needs to be done scientifically, rigorously and by an agency that is used to doing this. The federal Environmental Protection Agency could search for a connection between the places where the five cancer victims live, scattered around the county, and their devastating diseases.