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| 11:13 PM | ||
| Users Online Now: 1,638 (Who's On?) | Visitors Today: 1,229,541 | |
| Pageviews Today: 2,157,025 | Threads Today: 812 | Posts Today: 16,291 |
| 11:13 PM | ||
Plagued With High Cancer Rates, One Tar Sands Community’s Eight Year Quest For Answers | |
| Tar Baby User ID: 1032233  United Kingdom04/06/2014 03:44 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Dr. John O’Connor can’t forget the cancer patients he’s seen. The quiet school bus driver who tried to hide his jaundice from his wife. The traditional elderly man who came to the examining room “yellow, almost green” and died the day after his operation. The Lebanese immigrant, deeply in love with his partner who lost her uncle nine years ago to the same disease, given less than a year to live. As the physician for the beautiful, remote First Nations community of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, O’Connor wants to know why he’s seen so much suffering. “Why should I see such illness in such a stunning, out of the way community?” he wondered. “It makes absolutely no sense. The rate of smoking is lower there. People walk everywhere … There’s no processed foods in their diets. It just doesn’t make sense.” It was 2006 when O’Connor first went public with his claims of unprecedented cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan. What followed were eight long years that saw O’Connor questioned, threatened, and forced to move, all because he publicly voiced his suspicions that those rates might be caused by pollution from large tar sands reserves extracted just 150 miles upstream.>> [link to thinkprogress.org]  |
