Cancer statistics high for Otero, Lincoln counties

From the Alamogordo Daily News - Editor's Note: This is the third and final installment of a series of stories about the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium and the possible effects the Trinity Site test may have had on residents of the area developing cancer.

"I hate the fact that we have been treated as insignificant scientists have been compensated but our community has been ignored," cancer survivor Tina Cordova said. "We have to fight for the recognition that our environment was damaged and, in the process, we were also damaged. It is a shame that they did not come back and tell us our food supply is compromised." Cordova, who grew up in Tularosa, was a medical student for two years before creating her own business in Albuquerque. After much discussion, she and Tularosa resident Fred Tyler formed the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium to collect data and see what they could do to help survivors in the wake of the 1945 Trinity atomic bomb explosion that shook the Tularosa Basin. In July 2005, they worked with several volunteers to collect cancer histories from local residents ending up with well over 100 documents of a cancer culture that had festered quietly among generations of families. Cordova said she found statistics on the Internet under the Center for Disease Control and Prevention for autoimmune diseases and cancers. For example, in 1999, the national average was 202.7 per 100,000 people, but in Otero County it was 694.6 and in Lincoln County it was 764.5 per 100,000 people. Read more

Cancer statistics high for Otero, Lincoln counties