Cancer rates are rising alarmingly in America’s Corn Belt states, including Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois, outpacing national averages since the mid-2010s. While the rest of the country’s cancer rates are falling, those in Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana, and Kansas — known as the Corn Belt — are rising at an alarming rate, data shows. The spike in America’s corn-producing states caught the attention of the University of Iowa’s Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center, which gathered a panel to investigate the trend.
One of the experts, Dr. Marian Neuhouser, a professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, served on the panel as an expert in nutrition and obesity. “The panel came about after they noticed that the trends for cancer incidence were increasing at a faster rate in Iowa than in other states,” Neuhouser told Fox News Digital.
A data analysis by The Washington Post, based on federal health datasets, found that the number of people diagnosed with cancer in the six Corn Belt states has outpaced the national average since the mid-2010s. In 1999, cancer rates in the Midwest were on par with the national average. Now, among residents aged 15 to 49, those rates are about 5% higher, a pattern that began diverging in the 2000s and has steadily widened. The analysis compared rates from 1999 through 2022 using multi-year averages for Iowa and excluding 2020 due to pandemic disruptions.
Neuhouser noted that some of the increases involve cancers that are preventable or detectable through screening. Researchers are examining both environmental and lifestyle factors that could be driving the increase. Outdoor UV exposure and high rates of binge drinking could be contributors, according to the Iowa Cancer Registry, part of the National Institutes of Health’s surveillance network.
Iowa’s Environmental Health Sciences Research Center has described the state as a