Columnist Susan Snyder: True drama unfolding in Fallon

Monday, May 17, 2004 | 8:10 a.m.

Some of the season's most compelling television aired Thursday evening.

It wasn't scripted. It wasn't hyped.

It wasn't "Frasier." It wasn't "Survivor: All Stars."

Dustin Gross and Annastacia Warneke are survivors, but neither got $1 million. They're two of 16 Fallon children who were diagnosed with leukemia between 1997 and 2002.

"Fallon, NV: Deadly Oasis" aired Thursday on KLVX Channel 10, Las Vegas' PBS affiliate, and was produced by Amie Williams.

Those who chose seeing "Frasier's" Roz getting promoted over the documentary about Fallon's childhood leukemia cluster missed a powerful hour of television, in which the drama was real, and the ending offered the ultimate cliffhanger.

No one knows why so many children in one small Nevada town face such a terrifying illness. Many of us don't even know they do. And we live here, not in the Pearl Islands.

Fallon is a pretty little farming town that sits at the crossroads of U.S. 95 and U.S. 50, 61 miles southeast of Reno. With its clear air and open spaces, it's a good place for people to raise alfalfa, dairy cows and kids. Or is it?

In a report released in February, members of the Churchill County Childhood Leukemia Cluster Expert Panel concluded that the cluster wasn't mere coincidence. But they also said they can't figure out why so many cases have happened, mainly because there isn't enough known about what causes leukemia in the first place.

But government reports and press releases can't begin to tell the story told in our neighbors' voices. The documentary had no narration other than the comments of Fallon parents and residents who live daily with the horror of a killer from which they cannot protect their children.

Statistics were revealed through footage from town meetings hosted by state and national health officials. We learned alongside Fallon parents.

"Would you tell us? Should we take our children out of here?" a mother said, breaking into tears during a 2001 town meeting with state epidemiologist Randall Todd.

We watched Dusty Gross, then 5, learn how the doctors were going to draw more fluid from his spine. We saw Ana Warneke cry as she had to lean on a tree and vomit during a family picnic. At 8 years old, she spoke of getting "treatment to get the infection out of my port."

"We have to be aggressive. We have to find out what it is," Brenda Gross, Dustin's mom, told us.

Air, water, soil and tree core samples have turned up little more than elevated levels of arsenic and tungsten. Health experts dismissed those as causes.

Residents wondered about farm pesticide runoff, toxins left behind by former industry, mining residue and jet fuel released by aircraft flying overhead or from underground pipelines leading to the Fallon Naval Air Station outside of town.

Health officials have rejected those causes as well. They recommended no further testing without new evidence.

"This is still out there," said Frank Mullen, a Reno Gazette-Journal reporter who has written some 150 stories about the cluster and spoke on camera. "We don't know how many other Fallons are out there. We don't know where the future Fallons will be."

But how many of us know where Frasier moved?