Volunteers Assisted Trevor’s Trek Foundation Mapping Childhood Cancer Clusters

Trevor’s Trek Foundation (TTF) is a non-profit organization committed to help facilitate research into the causes of childhood cancer and to develop the means to eradicate those causes. Signed into law in 2016, Trevor’s Law (attached to the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act) helps communities determine whether there is a connection between “clusters” of cancer and contaminants in the surrounding environment. TTF developed a Childhood Cancer Cluster Buster Program to track childhood cancer cases, identify childhood cancer cluster sites across the United States, and ensure impacted communities receive assistance in their community per the language of Trevor’s Law.

GISCorps volunteer Mark Roberts assisted Trevor’s Trek Foundation in their mission to update their Childhood Cancer Cluster Buster interactive map for their website. Trevor’s Trek Foundation wanted to use ArcGIS Online and Survey123 to allow visitors to the website to input locations and cancer-related information of children with cancer (either themselves or loved ones). In the scope of this stage of the project, Trevor’s Trek Foundation provided Mark a dataset of locations of childhood cancer patients that had been submitted prior to this project. Mark created a map, Dashboard, and then a Survey on Survey123 to input the data from Trevor’s Trek Foundation.

Using ArcGIS Online enabled Trevor’s Trek Foundation to create more visually appealing graphics and organize, sort, and filter data. This included demographic information about the individuals as well as their residential history. For example, the survey allows visitors to input information about dates of specific cancer diagnoses, the child’s gender, locate the residence on a map, years spent at that residence prior to diagnosis, as well as the option to attach a photo of the child with cancer.

The collected information provides individuals and Trevor’s Trek Foundation a way to identify patterns in time, space, and of specific types of cancer that would be instrumental to finding potential childhood cancer clusters. Trevor’s Trek Foundation could then bring this information to county or state public health departments to provide evidence of a possible childhood cancer cluster and begin an investigation.

TTF requested to extend the project to a second phase in order to add additional functionality to the Survey123 form, map, and dashboard created in the first phase of the project. GISCorps volunteer, Andrew Southern, was selected to continue work on this project. 

During Phase 2, the existing Survey123 form was streamlined in order to enhance user experience and facilitate various data quality control measures. For example, the “pulldata” function within the survey’s XLS form allows for the use of an external CSV containing latitude and longitude values for all zip codes across the United States. Rather than creating the data point by searching for an address or manually placing a point on the map, the user is able to instead enter only the zip code and the geometry of the point is created automatically. This allows for the collection of geographic data critical to the project’s cause with minimal input by the user.

Calculations within form that create geometry (geopoint) based off the pulldata function and the “zip” question

Additionally, ArcGIS Dashboards was leveraged as a way to effectively communicate the data collected in a quick and meaningful way. Points were clustered to help illustrate areas where multiple surveys have been submitted.

Project completed.