[CPEO-MEF] Alaskan natives and contamination

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

A toxic legacy?: Many Alaska Natives believe environmental contamination
is behind outbreaks of cancer 


By DIANA CAMPBELL
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
December 8, 2004

NORTHWAY, Alaska--Mary Ann Albert doesn't take steam baths anymore.
She's too embarrassed because of her mastectomy scars, the products of
breast cancer.

Now, instead of spending time with women friends in a homemade steam
bath popular in the Athabascan village of Northway, she stays at home to
watch granddaughters. 

Ask her how she thinks she became a cancer patient in 2001, and she'll
tell you she was a regular smoker until her diagnosis. But she'll also
tell you that she wonders if the military barrels of mysterious origin
buried in the land on which her house sits may also have been a factor.

No one knows.

What is known, though, is that the military used Northway for an
airfield during World War II and that the community was also a staging
area for construction of the Alaska Highway. Garbage, like green
military knapsacks, from another era pokes out of the soil at the side
of Albert's driveway.

Although the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has removed many of the
barrels from beneath Albert's house, and at other sites around Northway,
the 56-year-old Albert fears the contents of those barrels remain.

?

For the entire article, see
http://www.news-miner.com/Stories/0,1413,113%257E7244%257E2583875,00.html

-- 


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org
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