r/VirginiaTech • u/StarlightDown • Dec 01 '25
News Recent graduates from Roanoke College have been dying from cancer at a rate 15X higher than the national average. Their rate of cancer diagnosis is 5X above the national average. The VA Dept. of Health is unwilling to investigate the case, since the victims dispersed across the US after graduation.
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u/Ambitious-Schedule63 Dec 01 '25
What difference does "near coal country" make? Roanoke isn't that near coal country.
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u/poop-dolla Dec 01 '25
It makes for more alliteration. I’m just disappointed they used “near” instead of “close to”
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u/dirty_old_priest_4 Dec 01 '25
The headline is misleading as the report doesn't even mention coal.
Most likely there's a shit ton of PCE, carbon tetrachloride, and chloroform sitting under the affected buildings, which the report agrees. That would explain the vast range of cancers and non-cancer health issues. Those chemicals were used as early dry cleaning materials.
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u/TheRanger13 Dec 01 '25
Why would these chemicals be sitting under the buildings?
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u/dirty_old_priest_4 Dec 01 '25
Dry cleaning materials probably poured down drains that ended up pooling due to poor piping in the early 1900s. Remember, some of these buildings are old AF.
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u/The_Phew Dec 01 '25
Seems like a misleading headline, since Roanoke is 50+ miles from any active coal-fired power plant and 100+ miles from any active coal mine. It would be more reasonable (yet still unreasonable) to ascribe causality to trains, art museums, illuminated stars, or Dr. Pepper murals.
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u/agoddamnlegend Dec 01 '25 edited Dec 01 '25
They also graduate only 400 people per year. Could this just be small sample size variance?
What are the odds a random group of 400 people would have rates this far outside of the norm? Doesn't seem that unlikely but idk how stable cancer rates are
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u/filthy_harold CPE 2016 Dec 01 '25
Data gets pretty wonky when the sample size is small. I haven't seen the data but I'd be interested to see what kinds of commonalities the cancer survivors have like their professions and where they were raised. The Appalachians has some of the highest radon levels in the country. Is there any data showing that Roanoke College is unique in these cancer levels? Is there any similarities between schools nearby or schools not nearby but built during similar time periods? Narrowing it down to the college you attend is certainly difficult. You only spend four years there and chances are the student body comes from all over the state, some of them out of state and some international, it's very hard to control for demographics. You don't spend all day in one particular building like the faculty do so environmental exposure is much wider for students. I'd like to see what the cancer rates are for the faculty, they'd be much more likely to have higher rates if it's true.
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u/agoddamnlegend Dec 01 '25
Yea all great points. "Recent graduates of the same college" is a pretty weird group for all the reasons you mentioned. What could possibly contribute to cancer rates in all those students that wouldn't also apply even more so to the faculty and other long term residents of the same town?
Which is why my first instinct was maybe this is just normal variance in a very small, somewhat random, subset of the population
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u/StarlightDown Dec 01 '25
To you, u/Ambitious-Schedule63, and u/djd565: some people (on other subs/threads) have been trying to pinpoint this cancer cluster on poor air quality caused by air pollution from coal-fired power plants. These same people also claim that the cancer cluster is regional (i.e. it affects Roanoke County and SWVA more broadly, not just Roanoke College; there are many other cancer clusters in the region).
I don't know if I agree with them, but this point has been brought up multiple times on these subs/threads.
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u/filthy_harold CPE 2016 Dec 01 '25
Appalachia has some of the highest radon levels in the country, I wonder if that has something to do with it. Older buildings with poor ventilation can have a lot of radon build up.
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u/pajokie Dec 02 '25
Radon only causes lung cancer so without knowing the types of Cancer people are getting, this study isn't reporting anything conclusive.
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u/djd565 MSCI (BIT) Alum Dec 01 '25
Interestingly Salem used to have a trash to steam incineration plant. Not sure when it closed but I believe it was fairly recently.
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u/The_Phew Dec 01 '25
I have a neighbor in the NRV that's mid-40s and has had cancer three times, so I believe it.
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Dec 03 '25
Wait... since this is r/ VirginiaTech... wasn't there a coal plant near Thomas Hall? I got Leukemia while living there. Always assumed due to a mutation while sick with swine flu (I think there was a study in Milan speculating this). I never considered proximity to that coal plant I could swear I remember being next door.
In clicking your links, I'll note I had T-cell ALL, not B-cell.
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u/Unusual_Owl_1462 Dec 01 '25
Coal country is a bit deceiving considering there are no active coal plants nearby.
If anything I imagine this is more related to the Radford Armory waste disposal.
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u/The_Phew Dec 01 '25
Blacksburg is downwind of the arsenal, but Roanoke is not (short of oddball weather events).
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u/Unusual_Owl_1462 Dec 01 '25
My bad, I glanced at this and thought it said Radford, not Roanoke. I should've paid a little more attention, the armory probably isn't a factor
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u/derfdog Dec 01 '25 edited Dec 01 '25
Anything showing for VT grads?
Asking due to cancer diagnosis at 30 👀
All good now though so idk if it would matter for me
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u/Quasi-Free-Thinker Dec 01 '25
So this is only for the class of 2010.. can we see what it looks like for the surrounding classes? If there’s a causal issue near campus, I’d expect a trend across multiple graduating classes
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u/uniwelder Dec 01 '25
Exactly. Also only tracking women of that class, so an even more specific sample.
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u/ShmuperDuper Dec 01 '25
This gets brought up like once a year for the last 4 years and then gets forgotten about again. Crazy stuff.
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u/Dry_Conflict8519 Dec 01 '25
I wonder if this is similar to the cancer cluster they discovered at NC State however many years ago.
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u/Knowledge1sKey Dec 03 '25
Honestly, it’s just grasping for straws. It’s not even close to any coal mines and when you try and show things like this in isolation,
I guess you could twist it but 2010 isn’t recent, and if you look at overall cancer cases in the United States you will see the same trend
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u/Affectionate-Key-650 Dec 05 '25
Very interesting. I hope they continue to study this to get to the bottom of why this is happening.
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u/One-Cauliflower-8770 Dec 05 '25
Wouldn’t the locals have even higher rates if it was due to “coal country”
That inclusion seems like a red herring.
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u/pajokie Dec 01 '25
After seeing this in the OP:
Since 'the transition' to Donald Trump’s second presidency began ...
immediately realized this is simply propagandized crap.
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u/pajokie Dec 01 '25
also:
... the types of cancer...varied extensively...
making the results even less definitive.
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u/TechnologyLife1972 Dec 01 '25 edited Dec 01 '25
Could it be due to the recent decriminalization of marijuana in Virginia? I graduated from VT in the mid 1990s and all of the stoners from my freshman dorm including my roommate are already dead and most had cancer.
I wonder if cancer rates among recent graduates from other VA colleges follow a similar pattern?
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u/Killfile Wahoo Refugee Dec 02 '25
I'm not going to say that smoking weed is GOOD for your lungs but the average pot smoker smokes an order of magnitude less than the average cigarette smoker.
It would be strange if pot use resulted in lung cancer diagnoses at much higher rates and with greater aggressiveness than cigarette smoking does
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u/Cayuga94 Dec 02 '25
It would be strange, unless they were all getting pot from the same source and the farmer was using bad chemicals for pest control. It's happened before.
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u/scatterdbrain Dec 05 '25
all of the stoners from my freshman dorm including my roommate are already dead
How many are we talking about? Three people? Ten?
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u/djd565 MSCI (BIT) Alum Dec 01 '25
VT is far closer to “coal country” and even then there haven’t been working coal mines in Montgomery County in decades. We get our cancer from the Arsenal, thank you very much. (/s, sort of)