Time to make some noise about cancer in Iowa

People are talking about Iowa’s alarming cancer rates, but they need to turn up the volume.

“We have to start getting loud with our elected officials about doing something about it,” Iowa Cancer Registry Director Mary Charlton told Iowa Capital Dispatch last week.

Iowa had the second-highest and fastest-growing cancer rate in the nation in 2024. Iowa is notable for breast, prostate and lung cancer, and concentrations are acutely high in Northwest Iowa.

The Registry is launching a series of county meetings to motivate locals to action. The first was held in Palo Alto County, with one of the highest cancer incidence rates, and the next is Jan. 23 in Dickinson County, with one of the lowest rates. Charlton hopes it will begin to drive legislative action.

Don’t hold your breath, although it might be advisable in the Land of Foul Odors.

Cancer is complex with many causes: Iowa has the highest binge-drinking rate in the Midwest, which is impressive next to Wisconsin. Our soil is a blessing and a bane, laden with radon seeping up from your basement and blasting about my house today when the furnace is cranking. As a people, we are chubby. The Brothers Cullen are genetically prone to prostate cancer, probably a legacy from Dear Old Dad’s side of our tree.

And then there is the gigantic elephant in the room:

Iowa is a sacrifice state for cheap food and fuel.

We have the most polluted rivers and lakes in America. We have the densest concentration of livestock on the continent, mainly in pigs and poultry, while cattle may be staging a comeback as water runs out in Kansas (beef) and California (dairy).

The Iowa Supreme Court has made it clear that it has no interest in regulating agriculture. Of course, neither does the Farm Bureau or the corporate chemical cabal that runs this state. It’s nearly impossible to increase tobacco taxes, which haven’t been touched in 18 years. No way the legislature taxes manure output or limits where confinements may locate. We will continue to grow corn out our ears to feed those hogs and hens no matter how much nitrate drains into the Raccoon River, one of the most endangered in America.

It’s about the money.

This goes across partisan divides. Liberals and conservatives all want clean water and air. Children who grow up in a cloud of manure dust suffer lifelong consequences, the research from the University of Iowa College of Public Health shows. Studies link nitrate pollution to cancer. Juries awarded verdicts in the hundreds of millions of dollars for cancer claims arising from glyphosate (Roundup) use, a herbicide that is so ubiquitous that it is losing its punch against weeds.

“What needs to be looked at are things that are probable or possible carcinogens that have increased beginning about 1990, because of the well-recognized latency of environmental cancers,” said former UI Public Health Dean James Merchant last February. “Those carcinogens associated with industrial agriculture are the ones that really need to be looked at very closely.”

Almost nothing has happened since, predictably.

Surprisingly, a lawsuit has threatened an 11,000-head cattle operation along a trout stream in northeast Iowa. The suing lawyer, Jim Larew, told the Cedar Rapids Gazette that there will be more litigation. "I view us on the cusp of a new civil rights movement in Iowa," he said. "It will take some time, but I think in due course the right to access clean water and clean air will be recognized as a fundamental right for Iowans."

There may be some lawyerly hyperbole or bullishness involved, given how the courts have resisted wading in. He will be a huge pain for the polluters.

Iowa’s cancer scientists are sounding an apolitical alarm — something extraordinary has been going on here for about 30 years. The concerns unite liberals and conservatives. The Iowa Cancer Registry has been careful to call for a comprehensive understanding of why Iowa is going the wrong direction without assigning blame. We know so little.

There is plenty of science to tell us that when you are killing the rivers and the children can’t breath, cancer lurks.

I remain convinced that, despite decades of Republican political control, Iowans want clean air and water. A clean and healthy lake has buy-in from nearly everyone here. We passed a bond issue for a clean lake. Clean water can be a political winner — more than 60% of Iowans voted to increase taxes for clean air and water in 2010. The legislature refused to acknowledge the will of the people and did nothing.

That’s why people need to get loud. It is difficult for legislators to hear when they are buried under a pile of corporate money. Only voters can overcome that influence.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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