Health Updated on Dec 23, 2024 5:56 PM EDT — Published on Dec 20, 2024 4:49 PM EDT
This might be one of the most powerful stories ever written about our radioactive waste legacy in the St. Louis Region. – Dawn Chapman – Just Moms STL.
PBS NEWS: Full Story Here
ST. LOUIS — Marie Farr and her family spent years fishing along the banks of rivers and creeks in North County. All the kids relished the days out on the Missouri River and its meandering tributaries, including one called Coldwater Creek. Farr’s youngest child, Aryn, loved it the most.
It’s why Farr kept fishing with her daughter even after her husband, Anthony, died of colon cancer in 2013. He was 52.
“Metastatic, no cure,” she said, recalling how a stage four diagnosis at his first colonoscopy was a shock. “He had no symptoms.”
It wasn’t until a decade later, when Aryn received her own cancer diagnosis, that Farr thought the family’s fishing spots may be to blame.
When one of Aryn’s doctors learned that she had stage three cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare cancer that develops in the inner lining of blood vessels, he asked where the family lived. A cancer this rare, which accounts for only 25 of the about 1.7 million new cancer cases each year, does not just happen.
The doctor mentioned Coldwater Creek. Farr learned the area where her family spent years on the water was contaminated with nuclear waste and that other local residents believed their health challenges were connected to this contamination, a byproduct of World War II-era nuclear weapon production in St. Louis.
“This is not like just five, 10 people, right? This is a slew of people,” she said. “We all can’t have the same story. We all can’t be diagnosed with some form of cancer and be located in the same area.”
Farr wanted answers.