Beatrice Abang-Ntuen was 25 when she felt a lump in her breast. The ongoing cancer treatment could lead to infertility, which worries her and her boyfriend, who want siblings for 8-year-old Jai'Lena.
Talking about infertility gives me panic attacks, the nursing student tells The Washington Post.
When the US began making comparisons in 1999, the corn-producing states of Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Minnesota and Indiana had the same number of cancer cases among young people as the rest of the country.
The highest nitrate content in the US
In the 2000s, a shift began to take place in the states, which now have a much higher rate of cancer cases among people aged 15 to 49 than the rest of the country, the newspaper's data analysis shows. Several forms of cancer are also significantly more common among young adults, especially kidney and skin cancer.
An annual report on the causes of cancer in Iowa singles out the land, where groundwater has the highest average nitrate contamination in the country and the soil has among the highest levels of radon, both considered cancer risks and attributed primarily to decades of fertilizer use.
Bayer, the maker of the pesticide Roundup, recently faced a setback when a bill in Iowa that would have made it impossible to sue the company for causing cancer was voted down. The pesticide contains glyphosate, a controversial ingredient that is controversially linked to cancer. Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world.
Not determined
While the management of the farmlands is being pointed out from various quarters, there is still no established cause for the number of cancer cases. Iowa's governor has invested almost 10 million Swedish kronor in a research project that will answer the question.
According to Mary Charlton, director of the Iowa Cancer Registry, the explanation probably lies in several different factors.
The complicated thing is that it is not today's risk factors, it is our risk factors from 10, 20, 30 years ago that cause cancer today.
