[HN Gopher] Amid climbing cancer rates, Iowa health officials ey...
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       Amid climbing cancer rates, Iowa health officials eye farm
       chemicals
        
       Author : PaulHoule
       Score  : 17 points
       Date   : 2023-12-26 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.thenewlede.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.thenewlede.org)
        
       | gedy wrote:
       | > The state is expected to see 21,000 new cases of cancer this
       | year alone, more than double the number of new cancers recorded
       | for 1973, the year Iowa began keeping records, according to
       | Charlton. Since 1973, the state population has grown only a
       | little over 10%.
       | 
       | I'm not "pro chemical" or anything, but screening has gotten much
       | better in 50 years, other causes of death have decreased, and our
       | society is aging rapidly. Chemical bugbears are probably not the
       | main cause.
        
         | mint2 wrote:
         | Seems harder to under report a disease like cancer than
         | conditions or diseases that exist more on a spectrum and are
         | lived with.
        
         | pixl97 wrote:
         | So you're saying all those people that are getting colon cancer
         | at 35-45 would have died of something else in the past, cause
         | that doesn't make much sense?
        
           | dekhn wrote:
           | What they're saying is that people attribute cancer deaths to
           | a cause and see increasing rates as a sign there's an
           | external cause of more cancers occurring, when realistically,
           | what's being measured is more likely to be increasing rates
           | of detection due to more sensitive methods.
        
         | blacksmith_tb wrote:
         | I assumed they also controlled for population growth, though
         | actually that's smaller than I would have expected, ~2.9M in
         | 1973, ~3.2M now. I grew up next door in Nebraska, and lost my
         | mother and one of her brothers to colon cancer when they were
         | both still quite young (late 40s / early 50s), I think there's
         | certainly some chance of agricultural runoff being implicated
         | (their two siblings who left and never returned are both still
         | with us...)
        
         | John23832 wrote:
         | I would then ask the question, do we see the same increase in
         | cancer rates in similarly agricultural areas around the world
         | (in India, China, Brazil, Germany, Russia)? The US is an
         | especially "industrial" farmer though, so there may be
         | differences.
        
       | angiosperm wrote:
       | Iowa, like most mostly-rural states (and many less-so), is
       | unfortunately under the thumb of advocates of what they call
       | "small government", which in practice means they instead favor
       | government by the whims of big corporations. Big corporations, as
       | a rule, favor not regulating toxic chemicals. As a direct
       | consequence, regulation of toxic chemicals in the US has been
       | hamstrung. Many toxins banned in Europe are still used in the US,
       | just as many banned in the US are used in Mexico. Mexican cancer
       | rates are worse than in the US, which are worse than in Europe.
       | 
       | Lately, paraquat is being blamed for the rise in Parkinson's
       | Disease. It might be something else. Very few industrial
       | chemicals get any testing before use.
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-26 23:02 UTC)