By The Defender Staff
Iowa Cancer Rates Surge — Farm Chemicals Are a Key Risk, New Report Finds
Iowans are suffering from higher rates of more than a dozen types of cancers linked to pesticides and pollutants than the rest of the country, with researchers saying the risk of pesticide exposure alone may rival that of smoking, according to a new report. Iowa has the second-highest rate of cancer in the nation and is only one of three states where cancer is rising, according to the National Institutes of Health.
For many types of cancer, the state’s numbers dwarf national averages. For example, Iowa’s rate of prostate cancer is 129 people per 100,000, compared to the US average of 116 people. The state’s breast cancer rate is 137 people per 100,000, compared to the US average of 131 people. The state’s overall cancer rate is 498 people per 100,000 — 10% higher than the national rate.
“This is impacting every corner of the state. There’s no bounds … Democrat, Republican, urban and rural,” said Sarah Green, executive director of Iowa Environmental Council (IEC), which published the new report along with The Harkin Institute, a public policy research institute located at Iowa’s Drake University.
Glyphosate Could Be Boosting Spread of Multidrug-Resistant Bacteria
Researchers in Buenos Aires have found that multidrug-resistant bacteria from hospitals in Argentina are also highly resistant to the common herbicide glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup (Front. Microbiol. 2026, DOI:10.3389/fmicb.2026.1740431). The study sparks concerns that exposure to the common chemical could be allowing drug-resistant bacteria to thrive. Because the multidrug-resistant bacteria that the scientists tested are highly resistant to glyphosate, “they could have an advantage in the environment where they are exposed to this pesticide,” says Camila Knecht, a postdoc at the Institute of Medical Microbiology and Parasitology in Buenos Aires, who co-led the work.
“If the wastewater of a hospital ends up in the environment and it meets with glyphosate, which it could, there is a risk that these species could be selected for or benefited in comparison with other bacteria,” she says. In the new study, the research team also compared environmental strains of the same bacteria from an area not exposed to glyphosate — the Paraná Delta.
They found that glyphosate resistance was also present in these microbes to varying degrees. Notably, the environmental bacteria with the highest resistance to glyphosate, such as Enterobacter, were closely related to the hospital strains. One way a bacterium can develop glyphosate resistance is through mutating the enzyme targeted by glyphosate, and another is by mutating efflux pumps, which act to protect the bacteria by expelling damaging chemicals.
How Sewage Pollution in a California Beach Town Is Affecting Kids’ Health: Headaches, Rashes and More
News From The States reported:
Last week fog crept over the Tijuana Estuary in Imperial Beach, oozing a pungent rotten-egg smell, as hydrogen sulfide bubbled up from the polluted Tijuana River.
Virginia Castellanos, the school nurse for Bayside STEAM Academy near the estuary, worried that students would get headaches, upset stomachs or breathing problems from the foul odor. She had another pressing concern: her own seven-year-old daughter was home sick with asthma, which flares up when pollution spikes.
“I’ve been having headaches and nausea this whole week,” Castellanos said. “The smell has been so bad. And I was already expecting my daughter to get sick and sure enough, in the last couple days, she’s showing symptoms and she said, ‘Mom, I need my inhaler.’”
Later that day, Thursday, March 19, air pollution monitoring data showed hydrogen sulfide levels at 500 parts per billion, more than 15 times the California state standard of 30 parts per billion. News reports stated that high temperatures last week, combined with cross-border sewage flows from a broken pump in a Tijuana sewage facility, contributed to the odor.
The Lancet Retracts Half-Century-Old Unsigned Commentary on Talc for Undisclosed Industry Ties
The Lancet has retracted a 49-year-old unsigned commentary on the safety of cosmetic talc after two researchers discovered the author was a paid consultant to Johnson & Johnson, at the time a leading producer of talc products. The anonymous commentary has been used for decades by corporate defense attorneys to claim scientific proof of talc products’ safety, according to critics. But one such attorney says the paper “would not be relied upon to any significant degree.”
Published in 1977, the article argued against government-mandated regulatory testing for asbestos in cosmetic talc. Around that time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was considering such monitoring, a task that ultimately became the responsibility of cosmetics companies.
The researchers behind the push for retraction, public health historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, have served as witnesses on behalf of people who developed diseases as a result of exposure to asbestos products, including talc. Rosner told Retraction Watch the two have been “confronted by attorneys for talc products” with The Lancet’s 1977 editorial four or five times in the last few years. Attorneys defending cosmetics companies “used it to basically say that the medical field did not consider asbestos in talc dangerous,” Rosner said.
Pittsburgh’s Air Pollution Estimated to Claim 3,000+ Lives per Year — and EPA Rollbacks Aren’t Helping
New Pittsburgh Courier reported:
In October 1948, a thick haze rolled into Donora, Pennsylvania, a steel town in the Monongahela Valley, south of Pittsburgh. For five days, toxic fumes from a zinc smelter — a plant that turns zinc ore into pure zinc metal — poured out of the factory’s stacks, became trapped in the valley and thus blanketed Donora. The air was filled with sulfur oxides, heavy metal dust and airborne particulates.
Firefighters carried 60-pound oxygen tanks door to door to relieve elderly and asthmatic victims. Nurses attended to mill workers in the infirmary, laying patients on the floor as hospital beds filled to capacity. Funeral homes ran out of space. The disaster eventually claimed 20 lives and caused chronic lung disease in many more. This was one of the first clear demonstrations in the U.S. that air pollution could kill.
Today, new global health research quantifying the risks of pollution exposure helps explain why disasters like Donora were so deadly, and why similar health threats persist. As a public health researcher and a public health physician, we recently published a study in the journal Annals of Global Health on the health impacts of air pollution in southwestern Pennsylvania that shows the Pittsburgh area as a hot spot for pollution.
Forever Chemicals in Pesticides Called Into Question in Vermont
A Vermont lawmaker wants to stop PFAS from leaching into farm-fresh food by banning the forever chemicals from pesticides and their packaging. When PFAS from manufacturing plants seeped into Bennington, Vermont Rep. David Durfee, D-Bennington, knew he wanted to stop the chemicals at their source. “Let’s not be introducing more PFAS into the environment where we can stop it,” Durfee said.
A decade and several PFAS bans later, Durfee is fighting to ban PFAS from pesticides and their packaging. “We need to attack this problem,” Durfee said. Research shows the chemicals are present in a growing number of pesticide products. They can make pesticides more effective, but they can also get into waterways, crops and the people who eat them.
“The last thing we want to be doing is using it in products where there’s sort of a direct route into our bodies through the food system,” Durfee said. That’s a top concern for environmental advocates like Lauren Hierl, the executive director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council.
“I think PFAS and pesticides is a next frontier we need to work on,” Hierl said.
She points to PFAS testing on agriculture fields in Maine, where high detection threw farmers for a loop. “It’s really devastating for the farmers because it means that, you know, once you know it’s there, it can be in the products that you’re selling, in the food, or getting into the cow’s milk… it’s a real problem,” Hierl said.
The post Iowa Cancer Rates Surge — Farm Chemicals Are a Key Risk, New Report Finds + More appeared first on Children’s Health Defense.
IPAK-EDU is grateful to The Defender as this piece was originally published there and is included in this news feed with mutual agreement. Read More
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