An alumni report from North Carolina State University shockingly alleges that over 150 cases of cancer that have occurred among students and alumni potentially came from contaminants in a now-shut-down campus building.
The university is located in Raleigh, North Carolina. The study takes a look at levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a probable carcinogen, that was present in a campus building that was closed last year in November.
“More than 150 cancer cases in people who attended classes at Poe Hall have been reported to local news outlet WRAL, which began probing concerns about the building starting around November 2023, a month after PCB levels at more than 38 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) standards for building materials were detected inside five rooms within the building,” Fox News Digital reported.
An attorney named Ben Whitley says his firm is looking into litigation against Monsanto. That’s the company that made the materials used in Poe Hall. They contained the PCBs that are suspected in the cancer link.
(Video Credit: Fox News)
“Unfortunately, I think we’re going to see it more and more in these buildings that were built during that range — 1971 to 1979. That’s when the PCBs were around. They were being used in caulking and insulation and they were like this wonder material,” Whitley explained.
He believes that when NC State tests other buildings on campus it will find more issues with PCB contamination.
A number of alumnae have come forward with concerns that may turn into litigation.
“I was finishing up my finals, and I was going in for a physical at the health center. … I was having night sweats for weeks and weeks before this, and I could not figure out what was happening,” NC State alumna Christie Lewis recounted to Fox News Digital in an interview. “I was having to get up in the middle of the night and change clothes completely. And then I would fall asleep. And I had to put a towel down. It honestly took me weeks to even tell my husband about them because I kept on forgetting about it because it was just in the middle of the night.”
Alumni report cancer cases linked to campus building.
1. NC State University investigating PCB exposure in Poe Hall
2. More than 150 cancer cases reported by students and alumni
3. 105 people diagnosed with rare cancer from attending classesNorth Carolina State University is…
— WorldNewsX365 (@WorldNewsX365) April 1, 2024
Lewis attended the university between 2007 and 2012, taking classes in Poe Hall which housed the College of Education and Department of Psychology. She ended up being diagnosed with thyroid cancer after discovering a lump on her neck diagnosed as angiosarcoma.
“And so just as I’m finishing up my finals and my papers, I’m going to see an endocrinologist and they’re doing a biopsy of my neck, and that’s traumatic,” she remarked. “They don’t sedate you or anything. They just kind of shove a huge needle into your throat and jab it around everywhere.”
At first, she just figured it was bad luck but then heard that the rate of cancer among NC State alumni was three times the average of cancer cases in Wake County.
“I could have never made that connection by myself because I didn’t know anybody else. I was the only one in my little cohort of classmates who had cancer when I was in college,” Lewis said. “And I just thought that something was just wrong with my body. That something was wrong with me. I have four siblings, and everybody’s so healthy except for me.”
(Video Credit: CBS 17)
That was before she read reports on the connection between Poe Hall and cancer.
“Maybe my body isn’t the problem. Maybe I was actually exposed to something that caused this. I don’t know, it definitely shook me a little bit,” Lewis stated.
“Poe Hall was constructed in 1971 when the use of PCBs in construction materials were common, but they would come to an end by the next decade,” Fox News Digital wrote.
“The 152 total cancer cases in people who attended classes at Poe Hall reported to WRAL have not officially been linked to the building, nor can the cases officially be categorized as a ‘cluster,’ which is ‘the occurrence of a greater than expected number of cancer cases among a group of people in a defined geographic area over a specific time period,’ according to the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). However, records obtained by WRAL show that the building tested positive for PCBs as far back as 2018,” the media outlet added.
(Video Credit: WRAL)
Another alumna named Jennifer Walter was also diagnosed with thyroid cancer and synovial sarcoma years after leaving the school where she attended classes in Poe Hall.
“The biggest symptom was the fatigue,” Walter told Fox News Digital about her diagnosis. “They had tested me for mono and all other things like that. … It was debilitating. I was able to work, but I couldn’t do anything else. And then there was really bad joint pain. So, I got tested for arthritis and all those types of things. Of course, they didn’t find anything. But it was, again, just debilitating. I couldn’t do anything. I was barely able to work, and then that was it. I would just go home and go to sleep.”
“I have medical trauma or medical PTSD, I think they call it. Around my scans, I get ridiculously anxious, because you never know if what’s going to come back,” she asserted. “There are such scary statistics that are tied with sarcoma. It’s just a lot more real. … They got it early, which I’m grateful for, but that fear never goes away. It’s something I’m going to have every day for the rest of my life.”
Both Lewis and Walter feel betrayed by the school because they thought it was safe there.
The university created a webpage after it shut down the building. It posts updates about the investigation into the contaminants at Poe Hall.
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Author: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
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