Cancer-cluster theory on paper, rage in father's heart
August 6, 2010 It began with a neighbor dying, then an uncle who lived down the street, then all the livestock on one Maryland farm fell dead, one cow after another.
And then it hit closer to home -- a wife fell terminally ill and a young daughter was gone.
The pattern became familiar, the stories swapped between neighbors sounding more and more alike: cancer, tumors, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, leukemia.
The Rice family has lost 12 members to leukemia alone.
"That's not counting brain, breast, all of those other cancers," said Diane Rice, 55, who survived breast cancer. "You just know that's not right. Something is not right."
Over their fences, at community picnics but mostly at funerals, the people of one Frederick neighborhood near Fort Detrick wondered whether it was just a horrible coincidence that so many of them had cancer.
Snip
They immediately looked to their former next-door neighbor, Fort Detrick, where anthrax and Agent Orange were studied for decades and where about 400 acres known as Area B were used for storage and dumping. The EPA put it on its Superfund cleanup list last year, and the Army has been spending millions of dollars in the past decade to clean up its harrowing waste pits.
Because carcinogens have contaminated wells, "A lot of people still get bottled water delivered to them by the Army," Rice said. Continued
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