Toxic Shock: The Environment-Cancer Connection

Frank Wiewel lives the Joni Mitchell song: He’s looked at clouds from both sides now. At home in the heartland of Otho, Iowa, where corn is king, he once saw clouds simply as harbingers of rain. Not anymore. Now he sees them as floating concentrations of toxic waste. As president of People Against Cancer, a grassroots group dedicated to cancer prevention and promotion of alternative therapies, Wievel was shocked to learn from an article in The Des Moines Register that the soil of America’s bread basket is so saturated with chemicals that “our clouds are laced with pesticides like atrizine that have actually evaporated out of the ground along with the water, and rain down on us from our of the skiy.”