On Friday , the state health department’s Division of Radiation Control Program planned to return to Newton-Wellesley to review information previously provided by the hospital and to perform some confirmatory measurements, the statement said.
Exposure of moderate-to-high doses of ionizing radiation, such as from medical imaging devices, has been linked to a higher risk for benign brain tumors.
Disease trackers said more scrutiny is needed by independent experts — individuals who are not affiliated with the hospital or the workers’ union there — to help resolve the issue in a manner all sides will trust. They caution that similar work-based situations have taken months to sort through, and even then, definitive answers are often elusive.
Further complicating the issue: the federal agency that typically is called in to investigate such matters, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, was recently gutted when two-thirds of its staff received layoff notices from the Trump administration, making a NIOSH investigation into the potential cause of the tumors unlikely in the near future. OSHA does not do the sort of disease-tracking investigation that would pinpoint a potential cause for brain tumors.
Joe Markman, spokesperson for the Massachusetts Nurses Association, which represents about 1,500 nurses at the hospital, said its members have a lot of questions.
“We recognize that nurses and many other people want immediate information about the situation,” he said in a statement.
“This urgency comes from a place of concern for the health of nurses, their families, and patients — an urgency that we share,” Markman said.
The union in late March sent health questionnaires to its members at the hospital, asking them to share them with other workers as well as nurses who previously worked there. Markman said the union has received about 300 completed forms and its team of occupational safety and health nurses is poring through responses. They’re also seeking follow-up medical records to get a clearer picture of the potential scope of the issue.
The union does not have a timetable for when its investigation might be completed, but Markman said, “We are glad the hospital is continuing to look into this situation.”
Newton-Wellesley Hospital administrators said they tapped outside environmental experts to help with a wide-ranging investigation that scrutinized water and air quality, as well as radiation levels and cleaning chemicals that workers on the fifth floor may have been exposed to. And, they said, they are continuing to work with state and federal investigators. Newton-Wellesley is part of the Mass General Brigham health system.
“Our rigorous investigation has not identified any environmental trigger at Newton-Wellesley Hospital that causes brain tumors,” the hospital said in a statement. “We remain confident that our environment is safe for staff, clinicians, and patients.”
Six current and former staffers from the fifth floor maternity unit have reported to hospital administrators that they were diagnosed with benign brain tumors in recent years, hospital officials said.
Among those workers is a nurse who worked there 23 years ago and was diagnosed in 2021. Details about the other brain tumor cases have not been released by the hospital, except that the benign tumors are of three different types, and the individuals included some who worked there only part time.
At least six other workers from the fifth floor also reported other health problems, hospital officials said.
About 1 million Americans are living with a brain tumor, according to the National Brain Tumor Society. Nearly three-quarters of such tumors are benign. The majority of people with brain tumors are women, the society notes, and the median age for a diagnosis is 61, which describes the typical gender and age of nurses in Newton-Wellesley’s maternal unit.
“Without additional information, no conclusion can be reached: if it is due to chance, or some potential work-related exposure,” said Tongzhang Zheng, an epidemiology professor in the Brown School of Public Health, who is not involved in the Newton-Wellesley investigation.
He said these types of cases are usually deemed to be unrelated, after a neutral third-party reviews all the potential physical and chemical cancer-causing substances that a distinct group of workers was exposed to over a specific period of time.
“Although a few chemicals (such as benzene, vinyl chloride, formaldehyde, and bisphenol A) have been linked to brain tumor risks, the association for most of them is still uncertain,” he said.
Thirty years ago, an investigation by NIOSH at Brigham and Women’s Hospital concluded that “major ventilation system deficiencies” could have contributed to poor indoor air quality that was linked to respiratory and related health problems among nurses. But the investigators noted that by the time they arrived, several years after other reports failed to settle on a single source for the ailments, the hospital had already started to fix the ventilation system, which complicated the investigators’ findings.
Identifying the scores of workers who may have cycled in and out of Newton-Wellesley’s fifth-floor maternity unit over a decade or longer, but who may also have worked at other facilities in the intervening time, would be challenging, said Dr. Michael Mina, a former Harvard professor who consults and advises public health organizations.
“It could be a [physical or chemical] exposure that happened there years ago . . . and now that exposure is gone, and that’s why these things are often hard to pin down,” he said. “And was there an overlap when all of these nurses were all there?”
While acknowledging the challenge such investigations face, Mina said hospital administrators erred in declaring the hospital risk-free while tests are still ongoing.
“I would want to take a more cautions approach, saying, ‘We don’t know, but everything we have found today suggests there is not an ongoing risk.’ ”
Kay Lazar can be reached at kay.lazar@globe.com Follow her @GlobeKayLazar.
