High rates concern California county.(high breast cancer rates in Marin County)

2002 DEC 5 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Women living in wealthy Marin County, set in the wooded hills just north of San Francisco, suffer one of the nation's highest breast cancer rates, a cluster that has confounded health officials.

On Saturday, about 2000 volunteers went door-to-door through the county asking questions that could help point to an answer: How many residents have cancer, where do they live and do they have any idea why rates have climbed so high?

"My hope now is that everybody realizes that as a community we can change our statistics," said Judi Shils, founder of the Marin County Cancer Project.

According to the Berkeley-based Northern California Cancer Center, white women living in Marin County are 45% more likely to develop breast cancer than women elsewhere in the country. A study the center released in July 2002 found cancer rates in Marin increased 37% during the 1990s - even as they remained flat in the rest of the San Francisco Bay area and California's other urban counties.

The researchers focused on white, non-Hispanic women because fewer than 10 cases of breast cancer are found each year in Hispanics, blacks or other populations in Marin County, which is 80% white.

Volunteers asked residents a series of questions, ranging from age to family cancer history and whether they could identify any environmental factors that might contribute to the cancer rate.

Finding participants wasn't easy: Tina-Lise Curtis, a 41-year-old dentist who volunteered for the project, walked away from many unanswered doors Saturday. She said she wasn't sure the ...