"Trump EPA Invited Companies to Revise Pollution Records of a Potent Carcinogen"
"Millie Corder didn’t know why there was so much cancer in her family. Her daughter, Cheryl, was only 27 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and 34 when the disease killed her in 2002. By that time, Millie’s husband, Chuck, had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He recovered, only to develop skin cancer in 2005. The next year, Millie herself was diagnosed with colon cancer and, two years after that, with breast cancer. Those years were a blur as she shuttled back and forth between her office, her home, and doctors’ appointments. While she was recovering, Chuck died of his cancer. Two years later, her stepson, Brian, was diagnosed with and died from lung cancer.
Millie Corder still can’t say for sure why her family was devastated by cancer. But since burying her daughter, stepson, and husband, she’s learned that the neighborhood where they lived and worked in Lake County, Illinois, has been inundated with dangerous amounts of a colorless, carcinogenic gas called ethylene oxide. Others in Gurnee, as well as nearby Waukegan, have been experiencing similar realizations over the past two years, since they began gathering in the basement of a local church to see what they could do to stop the pollution.
Stop EtO in Lake County was founded to limit the cancer-causing gas, which was coming from local plants, but it also became a way for members to trace their troubling cancer “coincidences.” Yvonne Davies, whose follicular lymphoma began as a hard but painless lump behind her left ear, learned that twin brother of another group member, Sarah Crawford, had developed the same cancer; he had grown up near Davies’s house. Patty Bennett, who had moved to Gurnee to escape a landfill that was near her previous home, went to a local forum on chemicals and cancer and found herself randomly seated next to a young woman who had been diagnosed with the same rare form of leukemia that she had. And Chandra Sefton, who has lived in both Waukegan and Gurnee, was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia: a form of cancer that is caused by ethylene oxide exposure in mice and rats."
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