Cancer in Ashland

THE HISTORY of industrial pollution of the nation's land, air, and water is by now so well known that the only surprising aspect of the report last week about the cancer cluster in Ashland is that the worst of the poisonous discharges happened so recently. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were notorious for manufacturers with a public-be-damned attitude, but the Nyanza chemical and dye facility began operations there in 1965. It was freely dumping arsenic, heavy metals, and carcinogenic solvents into waste lagoons while US astronauts were walking on the moon in 1969.

That landing on the moon was followed by a long overdue attention to the fouling of this planet. Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972 and the Superfund law, for cleanup of such sites, in 1980. A report like the one the state Department of Public Health released this week on the Ashland pollution and its apparent link to cancers in that town should give new impetus to efforts in Congress to strengthen the financial underpinnings of the Superfund law.

Establishing a causal connection between toxic discharges and specific cases of cancer is always difficult. The evidence in the DPH report is strongest in regard to the five soft-tissue sarcomas diagnosed over a two-year period in Ashland residents younger than 35. All five persons, two of whom died of the disease, were known to have played in the contaminated water that eventually made Ashland one of the 10 most polluted Superfund sites.

According to epidemiologists, the average occurrence of such cancers in the United States would be two cases per year in a population of 100,000. Since Ashland in 1970 had a population of just 8,882, it should have seen far fewer than even one case in a year. The concentration of soft-tissue sarcomas in the town could have been a fluke, but there is now a serious study saying it was not.

Though there is work still to be done in cleaning up an underground plume of Ashland pollution, the project is proceeding apace. That is sadly not the case with many other Superfund sites because Congress has refused to renew the provision in the 1980 law that taxed companies in the high-polluting chemical and petroleum industries to pay for the cleanup of sites where the original polluter has gone out of business or cannot be identified.

Without such a fund, the US Environmental Protection Agency has had to seek annual appropriations for the cleanup of such ''orphan" operations, and Congress has refused to give the agency the money needed to do the work expeditiously. Ashland is a grim reminder of what is at stake when Congress puts the interests of its campaign donors in industry ahead of the public interest.