And when we were soliciting bids, I had companies tell me that both our medical and our prescription costs were very high. Finally Kleba heard from Mary Jo Dazey and Peggy Buhrman. Moms from Cottleville, a town south of the Weldon Spring site, they'd tried to research local leukemia rates in the early '90s. Then they found four more leukemia cases in the district. Now another young girl in Meadow Ridge had been found to have leukemia.
Nobody knows what causes most cases of childhood leukemia.
It's one of the most common childhood cancers, but childhood cancer itself is relatively rare, hitting only one or two kids in every 10,000. But because the overall rate, averaged over the entire 22 years, wasn't increased, and because the geographic distribution wasn't patterned around the Weldon Spring site, the state saw no need for concern. By mid-February, even some of Kleba's own parishioners were starting to doubt his quest. Even Bob Hoing, one of the parish's old stalwarts, hinted with all the tact he could muster that Kleba was heading down a foolish path. I guess I'm sort of a fatalist about it.