Following our recent story on Canterbury’s Crohn’s rates, a New Zealand woman contacted us to share her family’s story of cancer, illness, and a Crohn’s diagnosis that came without warning — and without a hereditary explanation anyone can point to.
When she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, one of the first things people told her was that it couldn’t be right — Crohn’s runs in families, and hers had no history of it. She was told, in effect, to doubt her own diagnosis.
Her gastroenterologist didn’t doubt it. And when she looked at what actually runs in her family, she found something else entirely: not a shared gene, but a shared exposure.
Her father used Roundup — glyphosate-based herbicide — throughout his life. In his later years, he developed tremors severe enough that he sometimes struggled to hold a cup. Both of her parents were diagnosed with different forms of leukaemia. Her father also had skin cancer and lymphoma. Her siblings have each had their own cancer diagnoses. She has had breast cancer. And now, with no family history of it, she has Crohn’s disease.
“It was suggested our family be studied,” she told us. “It never happened.“
She asked her father, more than once, to stop using the chemical. He wouldn’t. He told her there were studies that proved it was fine.
We want to be careful here, because she was too. She isn’t claiming glyphosate caused her illness, or her family’s illnesses. She knows that isn’t something anyone can prove from one family’s experience, and she said so herself. What she’s asking is much simpler, and much harder to argue with: why has no one looked?
That question sits at the centre of the research we’ve covered in this series. Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis are rising sharply across New Zealand, and Canterbury in particular now has one of the highest recorded rates of Crohn’s disease anywhere in the world. Genetics can’t explain a rise that fast. Something else is happening — and the leading medical explanation, in the absence of a single dominant cause, is that environmental exposures are interacting with the gut in ways the research is only beginning to map.
She isn’t a scientist, and she isn’t claiming to be one. She’s a person who was told a fact about her own illness that turned out to be wrong — that Crohn’s requires a family history — and who, in questioning that, found a pattern in her own family worth someone taking seriously.
We’d like to make sure she doesn’t have to ask alone.
If her story sounds familiar to you — if you or someone in your family has faced an unexplained cluster of illness alongside long-term glyphosate exposure — you’re not the only one. We’ve collected other stories like hers here: nomoreglyphosate.nz/tag/personal-story
Details in this story have been shared with the person’s full consent, on the condition of complete anonymity, in part because other family members have not been part of this conversation and their privacy deserves protection too.
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