Environmental experts, lawyers say health risks in Iowa’s water leading to ‘preventable suffering’

The executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network says Iowa must work to end its preventable suffering.

Carolyn Raffensperger — who is also an environmental lawyer — said that “preventable suffering” involves cancer diagnoses and birth defects that are linked to water contamination across the state.

With the amount of contamination in the state’s water supply primarily from agricultural runoff and industrial agriculture, quoting a colleague, Raffensperger said during an online water quality forum that “we are now in hospice ecology in Iowa” and that “Iowa is dying” ecologically.

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A summer of nitrate spikes

Raffensperger’s talk with the nonprofit Food & Water Watch on Tuesday comes as Iowa has seen a spike in nitrate levels in water supplies across the state, but primarily in central Iowa in Polk County.

As of Wednesday, commercial lawn watering has started phasing back in, after the Central Iowa Water Works placed a ban on residential watering on June 12.

The ban was initially put into effect to combat the spike in nitrate levels in the region’s water supply, which surpassed the Environmental Protection Agency’s 10 milligram per liter legal threshold, which was set by the Agency in 1992.

At one point during the ban, the Raccoon River — which runs through Des Moines — reached a nitrate level of 16.04 mg/L on July 2. In late June, the Des Moines River was reported to have nitrate levels of 14.57 mg/L. The rivers feed into the region’s water plants to be treated.

In Cedar Rapids, city officials said that the city water was safe for consumption, despite the spikes that were seen across the state. As of Monday, July 28, Cedar Rapids’ two water treatment plants were at about 6.4 mg/L and 6.3 mg/L of nitrate, respectively. The Cedar River was reported to be at 8.31 mg/L, which is the water before it is treated at the two city plants.

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In addition to some types of cancer, high levels of nitrate in water also have been linked to “blue baby syndrome,” a life-threatening condition that can reduce an infant’s ability to get oxygen through the bloodstream.

“We are to our we are charged with preventing the preventable suffering of the cancer and birth defects associated with our wayward industrial agriculture,” Raffensperger said, who added that her own husband is in hospice with cancer, which she said is likely tied to agricultural chemicals. “We are charged with getting Iowa out of hospice ecology.”

In February, it was announced that although the number of cancer survivors is growing in the state, Iowa continues to have the fastest-growing cancer rate in the nation.

Iowa ranks second, only behind Kentucky in the rate of new cancers, according to previous reporting by The Gazette.

“This is a real public health concern,” Jennifer Breon, the nonprofit’s Iowa organizer, said in the forum. But “there are a lot of solutions out there.”

Nitrate and water contamination in Iowa

Breon — who is based in Iowa City — said that Iowa has more factory farms than any other state and that those factory farms produce 108 billion pounds of manure every year.

“That's 25 times as much as Iowa's human population, and that waste is largely unregulated and untreated,” she said.

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With the level of contamination in Iowa’s waterways and the health risks they pose, Raffensperger said Iowa is creating “an index of suffering.”

With “every single person, every single number … that is a measure of suffering. It is an index of suffering, and I would submit to you that we probably need to create one, and we need to call it that. We need to call it suffering,” she said. “We (need to) take precautionary action to prevent that harm, to prevent suffering and every time that (Gov. Kim) Reynolds or anyone else avoids taking action to prevent a cancer or a birth defects or further pollution of our rivers, it says that they do not care about the suffering of people you know.”

Raffensperger also said that it is imperative for Iowans to remember that each person whose health is affected by water contamination is more than just a data point.

“My own husband is in hospice right now, dying of cancer, probably caused by agricultural chemicals, and he's not just a statistic,” Raffensperger said. “Every single person that adds up to another statistic, another number in our database as having cancer or a birth defect that is in some way linked to agricultural or other chemicals.”

Biologist Sandra Steingraber also spoke at the forum, highlighting her firsthand account of cancer.

Steingraber was diagnosed with cancer on two separate occasions, once with bladder cancer when she was 20 years old and another time in her 30s with colon cancer.

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Steingraber — who also writes about and gives lectures on the environmental factors that contribute to both reproductive health problems and environmental links to cancer — was adopted as a child.

Steingraber, who is now 66, said multiple people in her family were also diagnosed with the same cancers.

“I realized that even though I'm an adopted person, that’s the reason that my adoptive aunt died of the same kind of bladder cancer I had,” she said. “My cousin, who's exactly my age, had a much more aggressive form of colon cancer as a young woman than I did, that these things are not explainable by a hereditary link. I come from a cancer family, but I'm not related to my family by chromosome, so I needed to look elsewhere for that explanation.”

This led Steingraber to take a genetic test to see if she had an inherited mutation that would predispose her to cancer. But just last month, she found out that she does not have the mutation, saying that the explanation for her health story lies “almost certainly” in the environment.

“I join with you in preventing suffering in Iowa, knowing that you have a terrible problem: some of the worst nitrogen pollution and water that we've ever seen, the highest cancer rates and highest new rates of cancer,” she said. “And so those two terrible truths together, I hope, (it) will lead to change.”

Olivia Cohen covers energy and environment for The Gazette and is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. She is also a contributing writer for the Ag and Water Desk, an independent journalism collaborative focusing on the Mississippi River Basin.

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Comments: olivia.cohen@thegazette.com