THE WASHINGTON POST, WINTERSET, Iowa — Mackenzie Dryden’s happiest childhood memories are of running barefoot through the sunlit corn fields of her hometown.
But when she was diagnosed with cancer 2½ years ago at 18 years old, a disturbing thought began to take hold.
Could something in the land she loved have made her sick?
Dryden went to social media for answers, and stumbled upon a deeper mystery: Within just two years, four other recent graduates from her high school — home to only 500 students — had also been diagnosed with advanced cancers.
“It’s kind of insane this is happening,” the college senior said in an interview.
Dryden’s questioning taps into an unsettling shift in cancer diagnoses in America, with rates for young adults in their 20s, 30s and 40s trending up even as overall cancer rates decline — and with geography appearing to be a key characteristic in who falls ill young.
Cancer rates among young adults in the Corn Belt, a patchwork of golden fields and straight-line highways stretching across the heart of the Midwest, are rising more rapidly than in the country as a whole, a Washington Post data analysis reveals.
The six leading states for corn production — Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana and Kansas — had the same cancer frequency as the rest of the nation for young adults and the overall population when state-level tracking began in 1999.
In the 2000s they began to diverge, and since 2015 the states have had a significantly higher cancer rate among those ages 15 to 49.
In the latest data from 2022, those states have a rate 5 percent higher for young adults and 5 percent higher for the overall population …
CORN AND CANCER: IS IT GLYPHOSATE? –
Childhood Immunization; Glyphosate; Suicide; Crisis Lifeline
