Lillie Hawker
Professor Mary Charlton poses in a lab at the State Health Registry of Iowa in Iowa City on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022.
Diane Anderson, a retired teacher from Hudson Community School District in Hudson, Iowa, received a breast cancer diagnosis in 2020.
She is one of more than a dozen teachers from the district who have been diagnosed since 2012, according to an email sent to school district families by the school superintendent. Anderson said this news concerned her, so she brought her worries to Ashley Ezzio, the outreach and education coordinator at the Iowa Department of Health.
“I talked with someone at the state public health department, and then they referred me to Dr. Michele West at the University of Iowa,” Anderson said, “She said, ‘If we do a cancer cluster correlation investigation, what we need to do is present this to the superintendent.’”
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