Since then, the material has become increasingly popular. Municipalities across the country have floated multi-million-dollar bonds to pay for new fields. Local leaders, some facility managers and companies say that turf costs less than natural grass to maintain, and can withstand heavy use year-round.
Given the relatively high costs of installation, it ought to be possible to cross-reference public expenditures on artificial turf and changes in health trends at fairly high resolution. Interestingly, baseball, which pioneered the use of artificial turf, has now largely abandoned it and gone back to the real thing: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/sports/soccer/22iht-ARENA....
Offgassing of VOCs from inexpensive vulcanized tire and tool rubber (particularly from "made in china" manufactured goods) can vary greatly. This can be empirically varified at any hardware store or home depot. Ingestion or incorporation of these off-gassing materials into the human bloodstream would are really beyond the scope of their OEM purposes/safety. By contrast, compare silicone rubber (widely believed to by 'hypoallergenic') with previous natural and synthetic rubbers. In applications from scuba diving to medical and food service applications, its clear that not all such things are create equal.
I don't get why they don't just play on grass? Surely it doesn't cost that much to maintain. When the grass gets too worn in England, you know what we play on? Mud.
Given that I know of amateur playing fields that have a dozen matches every weekend with absolutely no maintenance done at all, I find it weird that artificial turf is so common in the US. Even if it were a watering problem, there's nothing too bad with playing on dry grass.
> Even if it were a watering problem, there's nothing too bad with playing on dry grass.
You mean no grass? When I was a kid and there was a drought in Pennsylvania, they didn't water the soccer fields in the summer, and the fields had less grass, and because they were so dry, there was a cloud of dust above the fields about 20 feet high. Breathing that in all practice gave me a persistent post-nasal drip. In California they have to water the fields. There is no rain for half the year.
Yeah, but that's just about the case in every amateur match out there isn't it? We're only talking about kids matches here, not pro football. The purpose of the pitch is to be played on, not to look pretty. Case in point:
Completely irrespective of whether there is a strong causative link between these things and cancer -- If I were a parent, I'm not sure I'd want my child inhaling little grains of tire rubber while playing soccer. They contain a ton of arbitrary hydrocarbons, whose health risks are often unknown and unclear.
While the 10-year studies are being conducted, I'd either make my child play on real grass if possible, or, at least, in a position where they came into minimal contact with this stuff.
I thought this article was going to be about ACL and ankle injuries. I've played a lot of ultimate frisbee. My anecdotal evidence says that ACL and ankle injuries are an order of magnitude higher on turf than grass.
The possible break in this is: "Since then, Griffin has compiled a list of 38 American soccer players -- 34 of them goalies". This at least seems to correlate something goalie related, provided Griffin was not drawing from a data-pool that was biased towards goalies.
It might correlate something else that goalies do, or some mental desire to be a goalie with a weird genetic variant, and so on, but it seems interesting that the position is a factor.
Griffin is, perhaps without intending to, doing exactly what you hope she isn't: she's making a list of goalies in the US who have cancer. Who else is going to contact her to get their name on the list?
The act of collecting a list is an error since the data collected is entirely meaningless. Here's how she should be doing it: randomly select a few cities in the US, then check the cancer rate among soccer players in those cities.
There are lot's of known cancer clusters because disease clusters refers to groupings not just by location.
It's a little more complex than what you linked to as the background cancer rate varies on a regional basis. But more importantly Cancer is a group of more than 100 different diseases. If an area get's 10% more cancer than expected but twice the breast cancer then there is probably a local cause.
But, again the statistics get's far more complex than just X expected rate of any type of cancer vs X observed rate. So, "Blood cancers like lymphoma and leukemia dominate the list." is by far the most important part. And more importantly there is lot's of precedence for occupational links to cancer mesotheliomas being the most well known. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesothelioma Though Tobacco is responsible for far more total cancer than asbestos the occupational links are less well known.
"If an area get's 10% more cancer than expected but twice the breast cancer then there is probably a local cause." That is incorrect: deviation percentage is meaningless without a sample size. In a group of 100 people, twice the rate of cancer means nothing. In a group of 1 Billion people, 10% is significant.
You're right that blood cancer is the most important part of the article... those are the cancers which are most common in children and therefore the cancers most likely to be found in an coincidental cluster in children.
My point is really to say, "what kind of sample size do you have in mind"? In this instance, the sample size seems to be everyone in a particular region who has played soccer. That's just too vague, in my opinion, to attempt to draw a conclusion.
Griffin collected names through personal experience with sick players, and acknowledges that her list is not a scientific data set. But it’s enough to make her ask whether crumb rubber artificial turf...is safe for the athletes and kids who play on it.
That's all she's saying; doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Also, the Erin-Brockovich-was-wrong story is overly simplistic. Many epidemiology studies are inconclusive because of small sample sizes. What is known is that the chromium levels in some neighborhoods in Hinkley, California were hundreds or thousands of times the normal concentration, PG&E settled with the affected families for a nine-digit sum, and that the most-affected neighborhoods have been razed.
Settling just means that PG&E did a risk analysis on how they thought a jury might respond. Yes, the Chromium was high, but high-Chromium combined with a cancer cluster is still just a reasonable outcome from random probability.
Given the relatively high costs of installation, it ought to be possible to cross-reference public expenditures on artificial turf and changes in health trends at fairly high resolution. Interestingly, baseball, which pioneered the use of artificial turf, has now largely abandoned it and gone back to the real thing: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/sports/soccer/22iht-ARENA....