It is very obvious that studying firefighter cancer is very important and can go a long way toward protecting those who lay down their lives for us every day.
But, I feel we are missing a lot of science and data that would be easy to collect—just talk to the widows of firefighters everywhere. None of the cancers their firefighters had are even being reported. Many of these guys were retired before the cancer drive began, so their cancers aren’t even being considered.
My husband, John D. Seymour Jr., firefighter, engineer, and paramedic, retired from Jacksonville (FL) Fire Rescue Department about 20 years ago. Cancers began before he ever left the job. All in all, when he passed away on October 8, 2012, he suffered from many varieties of skin cancers; an advanced and aggressive prostate cancer; and, in the end, a very aggressive pancreatic cancer that killed him within 30 days of his first symptom. To my knowledge, none of these cancers was reported to those who are studying firefighter cancers in spite of the fact that he was involved in a number of serious chemical fires in the area.
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