“As children at Patrick Air Force Base in the early 1980s, Kristen Emery and her siblings fished Florida’s Banana River and strung their catch on the back porch to eat. They dug up the backyard, muddying their hands. When they were thirsty, they drank tap water at their base housing.

Kristen’s nose bled all the time. She was in and out of the emergency room constantly with asthma or other illnesses from kindergarten through second grade…

When puberty hit at 13, a large mass grew on her neck. The diagnosis was terrifying: Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She spent her teenage years in chemotherapy…

The family moved on to their next assignment, at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. Emery’s grandmother stayed at Cocoa Beach, near Patrick.

In 1991, after Emery’s diagnosis, her grandmother started mailing her newspaper articles.

In all, the tiny neighborhood by Patrick in 1991 discovered at least 12 cases of Hodgkin’s tied to people who had lived there between 1967 and 1983. The Orlando Sentinel called the cases ‘an unusually high incidence’ of the extremely rare cancer, which affects about 8,500 people in the United States each year, according to the American Cancer Society.

A local furor erupted with the discovery. But it died down just as fast…

‘All the sudden, it just kind of went away,’ Emery recalled. ‘They said, ‘Nope, there’s absolutely no way this is connected.’ It got shut down, and we don’t hear anything about it. Until now, it’s starting to come back up again.’

In April, Military Times reported that the Pentagon had, for the first time, released a full study on military installations where it has found higher-than-recommended levels of cancer-causing perflourinated compounds ― perfluorooctane sulfonate or perfluorooctanoic acid, commonly referred to as PFOS or PFOA ― in either the base water drinking systems or groundwater. Patrick Air Force Base was one of the bases identified…

After the Military Times published an April article about toxins found on military bases, about a dozen families contacted the Military Times with similar tales: service members or spouses who were battling cancer. Multiple instances of autism or other developmental issues in their kids. And a suspicion that the rate of health issues in their military neighborhoods seems too high to be just a coincidence.”

Read the full article by Tara Copp