Residents of small farm town in Iowa fear they're being poisoned as 'newspaper obituary pages are full of cancer deaths' READ MORE: Why as Iowa becomes America's cancer capital By Alexa Lardieri U.S. Deputy Health Editor Dailymail.
Com Published: 13:52 EDT, 11 June 2024 | Updated: 15:28 EDT, 11 June 2024 e-mail 6 View comments Maureen Reeves Horsley, a native of a small Iowan farming county, says she can rarely look at local obituaries without seeing someone who has died from cancer. In Palo Alto County, dozens of residents are diagnosed with and dying from cancers as their state becomes one of the few to see progress fighting the disease reversed. And while Ms Horsley remembers a time when the area's crops were plentiful, the lakes were crystal clear and people drank water right from their farms, residents now question whether the land they used to live off was slowly poisoning them.
Palo Alto County is home to approximately 8,800 people and 840 farms and it has cancer rates nearly 50 percent higher than the country's average. Ms Horsley, a nurse, said she is among many Iowans who speculate that the farms families relied on for food and income were actually the source of their diseases because of toxic pollutants and chemicals used in the agricultural industry. Chris Green's husband, Jim Green, died from the brain cancer glioblastoma in 2019 after working in an Iowan aluminum plant for 40 years Linus Solberg, a farmer and Palo Alto County supervisor, said his father developed.
