David Friedberg: Is This Pesticide Causing a Colon Cancer Spike in Young People?

There's been a scary rise in the number of young people, people generally under 50 years old that are getting colon cancer. That number has climbed by over 80%. In just the last two decades, historically, it's been an age related disease. So, as you get older, over 70 years old, your probability of getting colon cancer shoots through the roof. But this rise in young people getting colon cancer has been pretty alarming. And there's been a real question mark on what is causing it. This is the difference between people that got colon cancer that were over 70. when you typically have a very high chance of getting it and people that are under 50 when you don't. And what is going on

with people under 50? And you can see there's this one row here that's all orange. That row is a pesticide called piclorum. And piclorum became a very widely used herbicide in our environment. And the problem with piclorum, one of the the things that's been known about it is it's very persistent. It doesn't biodegrade very well. Picllorum sticks around for well over a year. It stays in the water. It moves into groundwater and it's persistently in the environment after it's been used for some period of time. The last time there was an EPA safety study done was in 1995. And so this was before we had this capacity to do epigenomic studies like

what was just done to elucidate that even though a chemical might not be causing cancer immediately and you can't apply it to a cell and see it trigger a cancer, the long-term use or exposure to certain chemicals in our environment causes a change in the epiggenome, which means that these genes are being turned 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 to malfunction and go haywire and ultimately lead to cancer. They then took that piclorum exposure. And then they looked at all the counties across the United States. They were able to gather data and they were able to look

at piclorum use estimates from the pesticide national synthesis project and try and deduce in places where piclorum was highly used and not highly used. And once again, it elucidated signal, which is that when pllorum was used in the environment in the counties more frequently, there was a much higher frequency of colon cancer in those counties. This shouldn't just be a one-off research project conducted by a team in Spain, but maybe should be a fundamental role that some of the government agencies play, which is to stop Americans and the world from getting frigin cancer. Let's figure out the things that we got wrong in industry

and go back and delete them out of our food supply and out of our industrial