Cancer took a toll on Brian Benerotte’s body and the lives of many people around him: his father, five brothers and sister, and the people along the gravel roads where he grew up in southeastern Minnesota.
Scott Graner, a childhood friend of Benelotte’s, said cancer appears to be growing on a peaceful two-mile stretch of County Road B in Dodge County. By their count, 13 people who lived on a road lined with former dairy farms near West Concord have contracted some form of cancer in the past few decades.
They know that they have been exposed to many pesticides throughout their lives, and the link to all cancers will likely never be found. But Benerotte says he always comes back to one thing. That’s due to high nitrate levels in water from private wells and from farm fertilizers and manure.
“That’s the only commonality here,” said Benerotte, now 60.
Their “Cancer Road” story is first reported By Keith Schneider, chief correspondent for Circle of Blue, a Michigan-based nonprofit environmental news organization. Dodge County water test results he obtained for 18 properties on or near County Road B showed a pattern of elevated nitrates in many of the private wells since the mid-1980s. Tests were conducted voluntarily or at the time of sale of the property. Of the 54 water tests, all but about 12 showed elevated nitrate levels, with some results double the state and federal safety standards.
The types of cancers that are occurring on the streets are not the types that medical professionals generally consider to be relevant and part of a cluster of cancers. In addition, the International Agency for Research on Cancer considers nitrates to be a “possible carcinogen,” but among the various cancers found on B Prefectural Road, only one that has been studied is linked to nitrate-contaminated water. Only a little. These include non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, colon cancer, and kidney cancer. The association with nitrates has not been studied in some cancers.
A rare public display by a County Road B family shows that understanding the health effects of nitrate-contaminated water is a rare and potentially deadly disease that has set the country’s health limit for nitrates at 10 milligrams per liter of water. This highlights how far the disease has spread beyond blue baby syndrome. It was officially established in 1992.
More recent research has shown that drinking water with nitrate levels above 10 milligrams is most strongly associated with colorectal cancer, thyroid disease, and neural tube defects, said Mary Ward, a senior research scientist at the National Cancer Institute. is said to have been shown.
For example, a team at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s School of Public Health is studying the role of nitrate-contaminated water in Nebraska’s high rates of childhood cancer.Childhood cancer incidence in Minnesota is second highest The outbreak occurred in 12 Midwestern states, right next to Nebraska, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Leslie Stayner, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health, analyzed data from Denmark and found that children exposed to the virus prenatally were more likely to have central nervous system cancers, low birth weight, preterm birth, and some They found evidence of an increased risk of birth defects. Nitrates in water. Importantly, these adverse health effects were found among children who were prenatally exposed to levels below the country’s current nitrate standard of 10 milligrams.
“There is growing evidence that current standards are not sufficiently protective,” Stayner said.
The Minnesota Department of Health said it is the first it has heard of concerns about County Road B. Dodge County’s cancer rate has not exceeded the state’s rate in recent years and is now even lower, said department spokesman Scott Smith. Smith urged people with concerns to contact state officials to find out. cancer and environment web page.
The agency recently set new health risk limits for more than 30 contaminants in Minnesota’s groundwater, but not nitrate. This shocked Gene Wagenius, a longtime state lawmaker and retired Minneapolis DFLer, who told the agency that nitrate standards should be lowered.among them replyThe Ministry of Health said there was “increasing concern” about the health effects but there was no sufficient science to change the limits for nitrates.
Dodge County is one of eight counties in southeastern Minnesota where environmental groups say local regulations are failing to reduce nitrate levels, creating an “immediate and significant danger” to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. We requested the Protection Agency to take emergency measures based on the Safe Drinking Water Act. For human health.
Despite the fact that so much water in Minnesota is contaminated with nitrates, there is little current research on the health effects. The Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Working Group estimates that 500,000 Minnesotans drink water contaminated with nitrates.
A Mayo Clinic team recently studied data on nitrate-contaminated groundwater in southeastern Minnesota counties, although not Dodge County. Although the researchers did not focus on cancer, they found links between nitrates and a variety of childhood diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, bronchiectasis, thyroid disease, suicide, and attention deficit disorder. their report It was published this spring in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Bennerotte and Graner would like to see lower limits for nitrates. He said state and local officials need to take further steps to address the potential health hazards.
“You can’t stop what happened, but you can prevent something else from happening,” Benerotte said.
Benelotte currently lives in New Ulm and works as a long-haul truck driver. He recalled watching his father, Howard, as a teenager, be taken on a stretcher from his home on State Road B to the hospital in 1980. He said it was one of the most painful things he had ever endured. His father never came home. He died of kidney cancer.
Just three years later, Benerotte was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic lymphoma, a tumor the size of a basketball that had enveloped her heart and lungs. He was only 20 years old. Surgery was not possible, and he endured three and a half years of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. He says he is still battling the effects of the treatment, which doctors in Mayo warned him of: “What healed you today could kill you later.”
Cancer has spread in the family. One of his brothers got prostate cancer. Another had colon cancer and died of Parkinson’s disease. Another brother who moved across the street died of multiple myeloma and kidney cancer, and his wife died of leiomyosarcoma, a cancer of smooth muscle tissue. Another brother died of complications from a type of blood cancer called myelodysplastic syndrome. His sister had MALT lymphoma in her tear ducts, but she survived. The only person who survived cancer was her mother Marie.
Prostate and pancreatic cancers are not known to be associated with nitrates, and some cancers that run in families have not had the association studied or studies have been inconclusive .
There is no way to know the nitrate levels in the Benerotte family’s childhood drinking well. Testing of that well in 1999 found 19 milligrams per liter. My brother and his wife, who had moved in across the street from me, later developed cancer, and tests in 1990 showed elevated nitrate levels of about 8 milligrams per liter.
Some people got sick along the way. Her neighbor, Larry Selley, died of pancreatic cancer in 1988, according to her daughter, Letha Selley. Mr. Benerotte and another neighbor who claimed Mr. Graner had cancer declined to comment.
Mr. Graner, 61, has spent most of his life on the road and now lives in Dodge Center and works as a postmaster in nearby West Concord. Multiple tests of wells at two of Graner’s County Road B properties between 2002 and 2011 found nitrate levels typically ranged from about 8 to 12 milligrams per liter.
Graner said she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2006. Although his illness is not curable, he is currently in remission and feels like a “ticking time bomb”. His mother had breast cancer, but she survived but later died of dementia, he said. Graner said he was exposed to glyphosate in the herbicide Roundup and received a payment that is one of more than 100,000 Roundup settlements.
Still, he said he was confident nitrates played a role. If nitrates are present in your well water, it likely also contains other pesticides and herbicides, meaning your farm water likely contains a mixture of chemicals. He understands.
Be careful with such combinations, said Paul Wodzka, co-founder of the Minnesota Well Owners Association and a semi-retired Wabasha County hydrologist. He said private well owners who drink water contaminated with nitrates are also likely drinking low levels of 12 to 18 pesticides, pointing to a finding from the state Department of Agriculture. report.
“That’s something people should study,” Wodzka said.
Benerotte also said nitrates weren’t the only chemicals she was exposed to. His family used malathion in the barn to control cattle flies and atrazine in the fields to control weeds, he said. Malathion is classified as a “possibly carcinogen” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Atrazine, an endocrine disruptor, is banned in the European Union.
It’s all just part of their environment, he said, and “we’re still trying to figure this all out.”