Read the full article by Brian Linder (PennLive)
“The alarm bells were ringing long before David West’s death last May, but when the pitcher passed away it was almost like a final straw.
He was the sixth former Philadelphia Phillies player to die from brain cancer, and the discussion went national.
Dr. Marc Siegel told ‘Fox and Friends’ shortly after West’s death that an investigation needed to be done.
‘It’s a cluster, and it needs to be examined,’ he said. ‘The amount of incidents of deadly brain cancer are about three out of 100,000. This is three or four times that or more.’
The Philadelphia Inquirer did just that in an investigative piece Tuesday that was titled ‘Field of Dread.’ It is an excellent read, and anyone interested in the in-depth investigation should check it out, here.
At the heart of the piece was the turf field that was used at Veterans Stadium. The Inquirer found pieces of the old turf, which were sold as souvenirs, and purchased them online. The newspaper then had those pieces of turf tested by two different labs.
And they found something sinister in the fake grass which they say was produced by Monsanto.
Forever chemicals.
Also known as PFAS, The Inquirer said that lab tests revealed that the turf contained 16 different types of the chemicals, which are known to cause a myriad of health diseases including cancer.
Whether or not those chemicals can cause glioblastoma — the paper cited some studies that suggested they could and talked to experts who said they didn’t believe it was possible — was not clear, but it certainly is an interesting finding.
‘We know that the liver is affected,’ Graham Peaslee, a physicist at the University of Notre Dame who studies PFAs, told the newspaper. ‘We know that the kidneys are affected. We know the testicles are affected. But nobody’s ever done the study to see if the brain is affected, because glioblastoma is such a rare disease.'”…