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There's been a scary rise in the number of young people, people generally under
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50 years old that are getting colon cancer. That number has climbed by over 80%. In just the last two decades,
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historically, it's been an age related disease. So, as you get older, over 70
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years old, your probability of getting colon cancer shoots through the roof. But this rise in young people getting
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colon cancer has been pretty alarming. And there's been a real question mark on
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what is causing it. This is the difference between people that got colon cancer that were over 70. when you
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typically have a very high chance of getting it and people that are under 50 when you don't. And what is going on
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with people under 50? And you can see there's this one row here that's all
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orange. That row is a pesticide called piclorum. And piclorum became a very widely used herbicide in our
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environment. And the problem with piclorum, one of the the things that's been known about it is it's very
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persistent. It doesn't biodegrade very well. Picllorum sticks around for well
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over a year. It stays in the water. It moves into groundwater and it's persistently in the environment after
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it's been used for some period of time. The last time there was an EPA safety
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study done was in 1995. And so this was before we had this capacity to do epigenomic studies like
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what was just done to elucidate that even though a chemical might not be causing cancer immediately and you can't
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apply it to a cell and see it trigger a cancer, the long-term use or exposure to
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certain chemicals in our environment causes a change in the epiggenome, which means that these genes are being turned
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on and off. And when certain genes are turned on or off in the wrong way, it can trigger cells in the tissue to start
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to malfunction and go haywire and ultimately lead to cancer. They then took that piclorum exposure. And then
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they looked at all the counties across the United States. They were able to gather data and they were able to look
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at piclorum use estimates from the pesticide national synthesis project and try and deduce in places where piclorum
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was highly used and not highly used. And once again, it elucidated signal, which
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is that when pllorum was used in the environment in the counties more frequently, there was a much higher
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frequency of colon cancer in those counties. This shouldn't just be a one-off research project conducted by a
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team in Spain, but maybe should be a fundamental role that some of the government agencies play, which is to
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stop Americans and the world from getting frigin cancer. Let's figure out the things that we got wrong in industry
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and go back and delete them out of our food supply and out of our industrial