Listening sessions highlight concerns about cancer in Iowa
Colleen Fowle, water programs director for the Iowa Environmental Council, leads a listening session at the Elkader Opera House on the evening of July 16. During the session, she encouraged the audience to share their stories about how cancer has affected them and their families.
By Steve Van Kooten
"Once cancer touches you, it doesn't really go anywhere," Katie Belser said at the Cancer in Iowa listening session on July 16.
The event took place at the Elkader Opera House at 5:30 p.m.
Belser, an Elkader resident, explained that her son developed cancer, and this past month, her family found out that he relapsed for a fourth time.
"Obviously, that's devastating," she said. "It's really important to speak on my son's cancer to bring awareness because for the last six years, I've spent a lot of time down at the university talking to doctors. The reality is cancer isn't going anywhere; it's only going to get worse."
"We've heard stories like this throughout the state of Iowa. That's why we felt it's so important to go to communities like this because, as Katie mentioned, it affects the entire community," said Colleen Fowle, water program director for the IEC.
The 15 listening sessions are a collaborative effort between the Iowa Environmental Council, the Harkin Institute at Drake University and the Iowa Farmer's Union. Their purpose is to aggregate data about environmental risk factors.
"While some risk factors for cancer are well known and studied, like lifestyle choices such as smoking, alcohol consumption and UV radiation from tanning beds, other potential causes are less understood and can be trickier to talk about in Iowa," said Fowle.
She noted that cancers are "almost always" multifactorial, meaning more than one thing contributes to their development, and environmental risks are intrinsic to understanding "the full picture about cancer" in Iowa.
With half of the listening sessions completed, Fowle said their preliminary data shows that the most prominent concern among participants is agricultural impacts on water sources.
She added that the Harkin Institute has found "a lot of literature" on nitrate, pesticide and PFAS exposure as possible environmental contributors to the development of cancer.
"They're going to consolidate the research in those three sections. They collected a whole bunch of articles and research, and they're going to do reports on them," she said.
The review will be published and used as groundwork for a statewide campaign about environmental cancer risks, according to material provided at the session.
"We want to make sure our findings are grounded in science, so we want to look at all of the research. Is there an actual causal link? If we have research that shows that, then we want to propose solutions," said Fowle.
IEC will likely take a multi-pronged approach with those solutions, including policy from the state government and public education.
To learn more about the Iowa Environmental Council and their work on the environmental risk factors, got to https://www.iaenvironment.org/our-work/cancer-and-environmental-risk-fac....
To register for the statewide virtual listening session on Aug. 14, go to https://iaenvironment.salsalabs.org/cancervirtuallistening/index.html.
The presentation provided facts about cancer in Clayton County and the state of Iowa, citing the Iowa Cancer Registry (utilizing data from 2018-2022).
Iowa has the second-highest cancer rate in the United States.
Iowa is one of two states where cancer rates are increasing.
Clayton County is projected to have 140 instances of new cancer this year, and more than five percent of Iowa residents are cancer survivors.
Clayton County ranks 66th out of 99 counties in Iowa but is still over the national average for cancer diagnoses. The county ranks 24th in Iowa for number of cancer deaths (approximately 166 people per 100,000).
Iowa is expected to see more than 21,000 new cases of invasive cancers this year.
