Consumer goods are increasingly made of synthetic materials and coatings. The carcinogens they give off when they burn could be driving high cancer rates among first responders, reports The Atlantic.
Tony Stefani had been a firefighter in San Francisco for nearly 28 years when, one January day in 2001, he was out jogging and began to feel weak. “The last mile I could barely run, I had to walk,” he told me recently. When he got home, he urinated blood. He was soon diagnosed with transitional cell carcinoma, a rare cancer of the kidney.
Chris Miller, a firefighter in Kentucky, had lymphoma 10 years ago. He got chemo, went to rehab, spent six weeks in a hospital, and lost 60 pounds. He took four months off work. The chemo wore him out and made his limbs tingle. It made him sterile. He will be 45 in November.
In 2008, Keith Tyson had recently retired after 34 years of firefighting in Miami when doctors found an aggressive cancer in his prostate. He says roughly a third of his department has had some form of cancer in the past three years.
“I’m not saying that every single one of those cancers was caused by the job,” Tyson said. “But at the same time … we have a problem.”
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