[CPEO-MEF] PFAS: "As [New Hampshire] community grapples with contaminated water, cancer patients seek answers"

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

As community grapples with contaminated water, cancer patients seek answers

By AMANDA GOKEE 
New Hampshire Bulletin
FEBRUARY 9, 2022

Carol Williams doesn’t live in New Hampshire anymore, but she links her cancer to the 36 years she lived in Bedford, just over the Merrimack town line. Williams only recently learned that the drinking water at her house contained chemicals called per- and polyfluorinated substances, or PFAS, which can be harmful to human health.

The first diagnosis came in 2010: breast cancer. Williams had a successful lumpectomy and radiation treatment, and thought she could move on with her life. The kidney cancer came two years later, a more serious diagnosis than early-stage breast cancer and surprising to Williams, with no family history of the cancer, which is twice as common in men. She wasn’t a smoker or overweight. She had always been an avid runner – and that meant she drank a lot of water. In 2020, she was diagnosed with bladder cancer.

Neither breast nor bladder cancer have been linked to PFAS exposure, but scientists have found a link between kidney cancer and PFAS – chemicals identified as possible carcinogens by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Bladder cancer has been linked to arsenic, another environmental exposure from well water that is more common in northern New England than the rest of the country.

Williams learned her cancer could be tied to environmental factors only after a state report was released in December 2021, finding more cases of kidney and renal pelvis cancer than expected in the town of Merrimack: a 42 percent excess the state determined was statistically significant. 

…

For the entire article, see
https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2022/02/09/as-community-grapples-with-contaminated-water-cancer-patients-seek-answers/

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)

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