Two clocks are running in Ladera Ranch: the families’ and the science’s; they’re in different time zones.
Aashita Shrivastava, Innovation Writer
“I understand why people want answers quickly, but it’s important to recognize that careful research takes time.”
— Anita Abazi, biochemistry student, Cal State Fullerton
Six cases of a rare cancer can mean nothing, or they can mean everything. The difference is arithmetic: How many people were at risk, and how many cases chance alone would produce? In Ladera Ranch, a south Orange County community, that calculation isn’t finished.
Residents of the south Orange County community say children there have been diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma, a rare bone and soft-tissue cancer. A California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) account of the project cites seven cases since 2007. The California Department of Public Health’s page refers to about six community-reported cases over roughly 13 years. For the families, the clock started a long time ago.
The state’s clock
The state’s clock runs slower, by design. Its formal assessment began in May 2026, using cancer registry data through 2023, and is expected to finish this fall. It has been upfront about what the review can’t do, which is determine the cause. CalEPA found no immediate environmental hazards.
A 2024 county-level review found no unusual Ewing sarcoma rate in Orange County, though the state says it wasn’t designed to detect a pattern within a single community. And the state can’t release counts this small, because they could identify the families.
So while the state works, a team at CSUF has been testing the soil and the water.
Jennifer Piazza, a professor of public health at the university, decided the community shouldn’t wait on a single source of answers.
“I can’t, as a researcher who has the skills to do something, turn my back on a community that needs answers,” she said in the university’s account of the project.
She also lives in Ladera Ranch and joined the resident group Ladera Health Watch as their scientific advisor. Being both a resident and a professor hasn’t changed how she approaches science, she said in an email to Miss Reporter News, but it has helped her speed up the research.
By her count, her team has eight faculty members across public health, chemistry and geography, four of them women, and 21 students, 15 of them women. She tells those students that one study won’t settle it.
“I tell them that the big questions can’t be answered with just one study,” she said. “It takes multiple studies to address them.”
Science’s clock
Anita Abazi, a fourth-year biochemistry student, is one of those students. She joined after Piazza brought the community’s concerns to her attention and worked on the preliminary soil and water testing. Her days vary, Abazi said, but the routine holds: “collecting and labeling samples, preparing them for analysis and measuring metal concentrations using ICP-OES.” The team then organizes and reviews the data, checking its work throughout.
ICP-OES is short for inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry. It heats a sample until its metals give off light, and the instrument measures that light to show which metals are there and how much.
What those measurements can’t do is the part Abazi keeps in mind. “I keep in mind that measuring metal concentrations does not establish what caused a health condition,” she said. “My responsibility is to help produce reliable data and be clear about what those measurements can and cannot tell us.”
Paula Hudson, an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, does the pesticide testing in her lab. It starts with water, “a simpler place to begin than soil,” she said. Soil samples are planned after. The instrument is a liquid chromatograph–mass spectrometer, which Hudson calls “really two techniques working together.” One sorts a sample into its parts. The other identifies them.
“Think of it like an outfit,” Hudson said. “If you put your outfit through the LC, it would sort it into pants, shirt, socks and so on. The MS would then tell you not just ‘that’s a shirt,’ but ‘that’s a cotton shirt, and here’s where it came from.’”
She lists the method’s limits herself. At this stage, she said, the screening is best at answering “what is in the sample?” rather than “how much is there?”
“And while LC-MS is very sensitive, every instrument has a limit,” she said. “If a pesticide is present at extremely low levels, it may fall below what we can detect.”
Where the clocks collide
An outside epidemiologist is blunter. Logan Spector of the University of Minnesota told Miss Reporter News that “in general soil and water testing isn’t going to be useful in a cluster investigation, especially if the cases occurred over the span of many years.”
He added: “However it would be exceedingly difficult to tie that to individuals’ exposure in the past.”
Piazza doesn’t argue the point. “I agree that we can’t rely solely on soil and water testing, which is why it is only one part of our ongoing investigation,” she said. What the testing can do, she said, is show what’s in the soil and water and whether any of it is particular to Ladera Ranch. What it can’t do is establish the cause.
The odds explain the caution. A 2012 review in Critical Reviews in Toxicology examined 428 cluster investigations covering 567 cancers of concern. An increase was confirmed for 72 of those cancers, about 13%, and only one investigation revealed a clear cause. That leaves Ewing sarcoma with few clues.
“There are no known causes for Ewing sarcoma,” said Janet Yoon, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at City of Hope, in written responses provided through the hospital. “It is not known to be associated with genetic, lifestyle or environmental causes.”
The other data isn’t simple either. Ladera Health Watch, a community group of attorneys, engineers, medical professionals and scientists, formed to press for answers and data transparency. The state says its assessment can only use verified registry cases, not those based on media reports or self-reported lists, and that community counts may include adults over 20.
Both clocks are right
None of this means the people doing the work are slowing down. They know the community is waiting.
“It has made the work feel meaningful and given me a stronger sense of responsibility,” Abazi said.
Hudson, whose lab handles the pesticide testing, spoke to the families directly: “Our hearts go out to the families in the community. We know how much they want answers, and we take that seriously.”
Yoon described a similar tension. “I believe it is our responsibility to approach the community’s concerns with empathy while remaining a voice of calm and relying on our expertise to provide accurate information,” Yoon said.
The instruments can say what’s in a sample. The families want to know why.
Six cases of a rare cancer can mean nothing, or they can mean everything. Until the arithmetic is finished, the work sits in the gap between those two answers, and the record of cluster investigations currently expects that gap to not be closed easily.
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