Margaret Burke had her breasts removed the first day of Roanoke College’s winter break in December 2010. “I wanted to finish the semester [first],” she says, with an Appalachian twang. Burke, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, attended the small liberal-arts college in Salem, Virginia, in the 70s, and returned to her alma mater in 1992 to teach sociology.
“What are they putting in the water at that school?” a nurse had asked her the month prior, during her initial appointment with breast surgeon Roxanne Davenport. According to the nurse, Burke was the fifth Roanoke professor with breast cancer to be referred to Dr. Davenport’s practice in that year alone.
At the time, Burke says, “I was so wrapped up in my own diagnosis that I didn’t really pay much attention to anybody else.”
She kept those blinders on—beating breast cancer and returning to the classroom for another eight years before retiring, in 2018—until last spring, when she started to receive e-mails from her former students and colleagues about an AIR MAIL article that described a rash of cancer cases in Roanoke’s young alumni population.
In that story, I spoke to the grieving families and friends of five young graduates who had died in the last few years from rare cancers, as well as to a dozen of their fellow alumni in remission. Word spread, and, following the article’s publication, the cancer count among Roanoke students and young alumni reached 45, spanning a 17-year time period from 2007 to 2024—this at a college whose class size averages just 500 students.
“What are they putting in the water at that school?”
My investigation raised a series of concerns: that the scientific community’s definition of “cancer clusters” (an unusually high number of cases of the same kind of cancer in the same geographic area during the same period of time) hindered the Virginia Department of Health (V.D.H.) from studying Roanoke’s uptick in cancer cases, since the types of cancer and locations of diagnosis there varied extensively; that the college agreed to conduct environmental testing but refused to acknowledge that the cancer rates were a problem, let alone account for them; and that, to this day, Roanoke students and alumni are still searching for answers.
Ida Peterson Hardon was the most recent Roanoke alumna to die, a year ago this coming Tuesday, at the age of 33, from acute myeloid leukemia—the same cancer that her fellow Roanoke class of 2014 student Seth Waxman had battled in a neighboring hospital room at Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore. Waxman died in 2021, while Hardon was in remission.
Meanwhile, in October 2023, a group of Roanoke alumni gathered to bury their friend, 27-year-old Marie Adams (class of 2018), who died of triple-negative breast cancer. “It has been painful to accept the reality that I will spend the rest of my life wondering what the hell caused this,” says her widower, Aidan Adams.
Adams’s haunting testimony concluded part one of my story. This is part two.
“It’s Extremely Rare”
Margaret Burke wasn’t the only person to reach out to me about a battle with cancer following the article’s publication. Survivors, widows and widowers, parents, friends, and faculty past and present told me their stories. The cohort I spoke to included 11 cases of breast cancer, 10 of thyroid, nine of melanoma, and five of lymphoma.
“It’s extremely rare to see these cancers in [people in their] 20s,” says Mary Beth Terry, a Columbia epidemiologist who also heads the Silent Spring Institute, a research organization dedicated to uncovering the environmental causes of breast cancer. Other people I spoke to reported cases of even rarer cancers: appendix, uterine, testicular, pancreatic, and Wilms’ tumors, a type of pediatric kidney cancer.
Until recently, the reigning theory among epidemiologists and oncologists when it comes to cancer clusters has been that of “one agent, one disease”—radon causes lung cancer, benzene causes leukemia, asbestos causes mesothelioma, and so on. When concerns about high cancer-incidence rates are raised, the presence of multiple cancers, rather than just one type, “is a big critique, usually,” says Terry. “It’s actually the way a lot of people just shut these things down completely.”
Yet Terry has found that this argument “doesn’t match with some of the biology anymore,” pointing out that many common chemicals, such as asbestos and vinyl chloride, have in recent years proved to cause multiple types of cancer.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.) changed its cancer-cluster guidelines in 2022 to reflect this change in the science, meaning that individual states are technically no longer allowed to dismiss cluster-investigation requests when they include multiple cancers.
Even still, because most of Roanoke’s alumni were diagnosed with cancer in their home states, rather than on campus, the V.D.H. refuses to recognize this group of people as being one “cluster” under Virginia’s domain.
Of the 45 cancer cases that we know of among Roanoke’s students and recent alumni, 36 occurred in women, causing the female-cancer-incidence rate in the community to be more than double the expected rate, estimates Mount Sinai statistician Boris Reva. (This is the most conservative estimate, assuming AIR MAIL has identified every single case of cancer—if not, the incidence rate would be even higher.)
The chance of twice as many cases of cancer being diagnosed as typical for American women in their 20s and 30s, according to Reva, ranges from 1 to 5 in 1,000—that’s not impossible, he says, but certainly rare. The chance of cancer in the male population, meanwhile, remained normal.
Cases among the faculty followed a similar pattern: 18 of the 22 cases of cancer AIR MAIL is aware of in a group of roughly 110 since 2004 occurred in women, and 10 of those cases were of breast cancer.
The administration declined to meet with me in person but, through a spokesperson, said that “Roanoke College unequivocally denies that there is any scientific evidence to show that students who attend our college are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer than students who attend other institutions.” The statistics tell a different story. “There is something special in this Roanoke cohort, no doubt,” says Reva.
But, he asks, “Is this college extraordinary? Or could it just be God playing dice?”
“I Promise We Will Be Transparent”
After the publication of part one of my Roanoke story, the college responded with a vow, tangled in assertions that the campus was perfectly safe, to pursue environmental testing. The investigation would be conducted by Engineering Consulting Services (E.C.S.), a Virginia-based firm. “I promise we will be transparent every step of the way,” wrote college president Frank Shushok in a letter addressed to the Roanoke community.
Behind the scenes, Roanoke’s legal counsel, Catherine Potter, was in close contact with Cynthia Morrow, the city of Roanoke’s district director at the V.D.H.
“FYI,” Potter wrote in an e-mail to Morrow after the publication of our story, “the author of the article is publishing a follow up article, so this is not going away!”
“Ugh—I was really hoping it had,” Morrow shot back. “I had a press briefing yesterday and was so thankful that nobody brought it up.”
Their written communications—copies of which I obtained via a Freedom of Information request—focused almost exclusively on the college’s P.R. plan for dealing with the cancer crisis, rather than on the crisis itself or the college’s plans for testing.
And, once the testing was complete, the V.D.H. never even received E.C.S.’s full environmental assessments of Roanoke College. Instead, Potter sent Morrow draft summary pages for review. One of these summary pages was even copied from a different report, referencing the wrong building names and failing to reflect the data that followed.
Despite President Shushok’s constant assurances of transparency, the college never intended to share E.C.S.’s full findings with its faculty and students, much less the public. “We don’t want to share the full PDF’s of all scientific reports publicly because people might misuse the data,” Shushok told worried faculty members in a September 19 meeting. “But we will tell you what they mean.”
That same day, Chloe Svolos Baldwin—a Roanoke class of 2015 alumna whose Hodgkin’s-lymphoma diagnosis spurred her own search for answers—wrote Shushok a letter asking him to release the complete testing results for the sake of Roanoke’s current students. More than 220 of Svolos Baldwin’s peers signed it. “We are writing to express concerns regarding the lack of communication and transparency,” the letter began.
Unbeknownst to Roanoke students and alumni, E.C.S.’s 2024 testing wasn’t the first time the college had investigated the mysterious pattern of illness on campus, nor was it the first time it refused to release the results of that testing.
“Wait, This Is What Students Are Experiencing as Well?”
“A piece of information you might find helpful in your investigation,” Burke once told me, “is that my office and classrooms were located in Miller Hall during my first 13 years [at Roanoke].” That would make her at least the eighth professor who spent a prolonged period in the 168-year-old colonial building, home to the English department (a faculty of roughly 14), to be diagnosed with cancer, and the fifth to be diagnosed with breast cancer, in the last 15 years.
“We need to talk about death,” wrote 51-year-old Roanoke English professor Sandee McGlaun on her blog on June 4, 2021. She had been battling triple-negative breast cancer off and on since 2017.
“I have three specific fears about death,” McGlaun continued. “I worry about the pain my death will cause the people and creatures who love me.... I also fear experiencing physical pain. Cancer isn’t known for being a fast, painless way to go.... My third fear is that I’ll depart this earth with dreams unrealized.”
McGlaun died three months later, to the day.
“Wait, this is what students are experiencing as well?,” Katie Webber, a former professor in Roanoke’s English department, asks me. When she arrived, in the late summer of 2022, the faculty was still reeling from the previous school year, when they had lost two colleagues, McGlaun, in September, and 65-year-old Jenny Rosti, to colon cancer, six months later. There were whispers about past cases as well.
Then, in January 2023, 52-year-old Mary Crockett Hill, a creative-writing professor and mother to four teenage children, returned from Christmas break with the news that she had been diagnosed with stage-four colon cancer.
Webber watched Crockett Hill’s co-workers do everything they could to help her. “People in the department were essentially covering her classes so that she could continue to get paid and get health insurance,” she says.
“It’s a small department,” Webber stresses. “Why is there so much cancer?”
Webber left Roanoke after a single school year. Crockett Hill died in September of 2023.
Truths and a Lie
This eerie connection to Miller Hall wasn’t lost on Roanoke’s administration. In May 2023, following Crockett Hill’s death and a whole year before my initial investigation, the school quietly conducted environmental testing on its buildings.
That testing—the results of which weren’t shared with college faculty until the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) essentially forced the school’s hand nearly two years later—didn’t focus on potential carcinogens but, rather, on mold. (OSHA got involved after a faculty member anonymously tipped them off to the school’s refusal to release the report.)
The testing did, however, catch President Shushok in a lie. The school explicitly told me that “tests have never found toxic mold and have never revealed a mold-spore quantity indoors that was higher than the quantity detected in the air outside the building.” And, in his first letter to the Roanoke community after AIR MAIL’s article, Shushok wrote that tests “have revealed that indoor mold spore levels are lower than the levels found in the air outside.”
In reality, mold-spore counts were up to 165,520 per cubic meter in one section of Miller Hall—more than 150 times the quantity detected in the air outside the building (1,000). “Occupants should not be using these rooms until mold remediation is performed,” Arthur Lau, a specialist at the environmental-disease-investigation company Microecologies who reviewed the results, says. (Though mold is not technically considered a carcinogen, it can, especially at these levels, lead to respiratory issues, allergic reactions, and immune-system weakening.)
“Just talk to us,” department head of Miller Hall’s English and Communication Studies, Wendy Larson-Harris, begged the administration at a December 5 school meeting. “That’s so basic.” (“The College feels we have been transparent,” says Roanoke’s spokesperson.)
I spoke to eight past and present professors as well as several of their widowers for this story. Many of the faculty members I spoke to referenced the administration’s tendency toward secrecy, fearing it would bar any real search for answers. On the condition of anonymity, they described their impossible position: anxious about their health and that of their students, yet relying on the school for income—and health insurance. Speaking out, they feared, would result in retribution and, possibly, firing.
Industrial Levels
The results of E.C.S.’s environmental testing, conducted following the publication of part one of my story and posted on a password-protected Web site available only to current students and faculty, raise more questions than they answer.
They reveal that E.C.S. opted not to conduct air testing for volatile organic compounds (V.O.C.’s) such as benzene and trichloroethylene, generally considered to be a crucial and standard first step when it comes to environmental testing, and one that could have provided genuine answers about what was being breathed in by the Roanoke community.
Lau says that the administration “may have told E.C.S. not to do air testing because they didn’t want to know [the results],” pointing out that while this shields the school from liability, it also leaves no responsible way to assess whether the campus buildings are safe. A spokesperson for Roanoke stated that they “never directed E.C.S. to not conduct particular tests.”
(“Because of the sensitivity of analysis used for indoor air samples, these sample results may be clouded by a wide variety of extraneous detections of commercial products that may be used by the building occupants” was E.C.S.’s stated reason for not conducting indoor air testing. “I call bullshit,” an environmental consultant who wishes to stay anonymous tells me. “Anyone who’s done this kind of sampling understands the interferences and recognizes that those interferences aren’t anything related to the chemicals you’re finding in the ground.”)
“It’s a small department. Why is there so much cancer?”
Instead, E.C.S. went directly for the more intrusive and expensive step of sub-slab V.O.C. testing, a measure they called “standard industry practice” which involves drilling small holes in the foundation of a building and sampling the air that rises from the soil below. Results from this testing indicated high levels of three chlorinated solvents—a class of industrial cleaning chemicals developed in the early 1900s and introduced before their health risks were known, several of which were later banned—in multiple buildings at the campus’s southeastern end.
Most concerningly, carbon tetrachloride—a man-made chemical that was used as a cleaning agent, dry-cleaning solvent, refrigerant, and fire extinguisher up until the 1960s—was discovered to be present in a dorm called Bartlett Hall at more than 65 times the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s residential screening level for sub-slab soil gas, which two environmental consultants I spoke to described as indicative of an “industrial” source.
(When reached for comment, E.C.S. did not address that the carbon tetrachloride levels were 65 times higher than Virginia’s threshold, but pointed out that “screening levels are set 10 times higher … than the risk threshold that is used to determine whether remediation is necessary.”)
Perchloroethylene (PCE), which replaced carbon tetrachloride as the go-to dry-cleaning chemical starting in the 1950s, was also found above Virginia’s recommended level in a dorm called Chalmers Hall. And chloroform, a known degradation product of carbon tetrachloride, was found in Bartlett, Chalmers, and a third, neighboring dorm called Marion, as well as in Miller Hall and in the nearby fraternity housing.
PCE, carbon tetrachloride, and chloroform are toxic to humans and are known to cause liver and kidney damage. The Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) classifies all three as “probable” human carcinogens.
PCE, in particular, has been linked to a range of cancers, including non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia, bladder cancer, and liver cancer. Carbon tetrachloride, meanwhile, has been known to cause serious damage to the nervous system. (The infamous Camp Lejeune cancer cluster, which occurred between the 1950s and 1980s in North Carolina, was found to be caused by contaminated drinking water that contained both carbon tetrachloride and PCE.)
E.C.S. also tested for radon and lead on Roanoke’s campus. The former, which is proven to cause lung cancer after prolonged exposure, was found up to five times the E.P.A.’s recommended level. And the latter, which is known to cause neurological damage, developmental delays, and kidney problems, was found up to 20 times the recommended level. While these results are concerning, the epidemiologists, oncologists, and industrial hygienists I spoke to all agree that radon and lead could not produce the high cancer rates Roanoke is seeing within five years or fewer from time of exposure.
There was more disagreement about whether the presence of chlorinated solvents would have been able to do so. Studies from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health suggest that workers exposed to high levels of chlorinated solvents, such as dry-cleaning employees, develop cancer much more quickly than expected. And several epidemiological studies of Camp Lejeune point to latency periods (the time between exposure and the development of cancer) as short as two years for resulting blood cancers.
Not only have chlorinated solvents such as PCE been found to initiate cancer, but “a lot of these environmental chemicals are promoters of cancer” as well, says Mary Beth Terry, the Columbia epidemiologist. By disrupting immune function and generating free radicals, which damage tissues, cells, and DNA, chlorinated solvents create conditions that allow cancers of all types to develop more readily and potentially spread.
(Kent Sepkowitz, an infectious-disease specialist who has spent more than four decades at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, disagrees. He argues that “carbon tetrachloride causes overwhelming liver failure, not cancers left, right, and center.” While animal studies have shown carbon tetrachloride’s ability to cause cancers, the human evidence is still weaker, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer.)
“It has been painful to accept the reality that I will spend the rest of my life wondering what the hell caused this.”
Even though Roanoke would have been made aware of these worrisome test results by late September of last year, just after the school year began, none of the students who lived in the affected dorms were moved, nor were they or their parents notified about the presence of these toxins, much less their dangers.
E.C.S. stated that “none of [these] results were high enough [for them] to recommend immediate action, such as relocation of residence.” They justified this position by stating: “The health effects in question are associated with chronic (long-term) exposure, rather than acute exposures.”
“They don’t know what the exposure is because they never did an indoor air quality test,” the environmental consultant rebuts. “How do you know there’s no short term risk?” Without that testing, he continues, “you have no idea if there was any accumulation in the building,” and therefore what the immediate health effects are for the students living in the dorm.
Remediation efforts in Bartlett didn’t begin until fall break, in mid-October, and Chalmers wasn’t addressed until winter break, in December. The school referred to the efforts as “appropriate responses” to the testing results, and follow-up testing appeared to confirm that the remediation measures were successful.
Even still, an oncologist who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity says, “I would be pretty pissed to find out that you let me sleep, work, and live … someplace [where] I could have just been sitting in a dry-cleaner shop and get that same level of exposure.”
“There Must Be Some Source”
“There’s a big mystery,” says John Simon, an environmental consultant who specializes in hazardous-waste-site cleanup. “Why [are] all these chemicals under the buildings?”
It’s not a question E.C.S.’s reports even feign to answer, instead concluding that “tests revealed no systemic environmental concerns at Roanoke College.”
E.C.S. told AIR MAIL that the test results “may be attributable to solvents being poured down drains decades ago,” seemingly contradicting experts’ opinions that the presence of carbon tetrachloride in Bartlett Hall was at an “industrial” level.
“There must be some source,” says Markus Hilpert, a Columbia professor of environmental-health sciences. “Is there a pool of carbon tetrachloride sitting somewhere down there? If you have a pipeline leak or something, you could have barrels down there, and we simply don’t know.”
“Given the stakes [and] given the cancer incidence,” Hilpert recommends that the college conduct groundwater testing, air testing, and further sub-slab testing.
“I think there’s definitely something happening out there,” he says.
Losing Hope
Despite never actually seeing the complete E.C.S. report, a V.D.H. representative stood alongside E.C.S. employees at the December 5 Roanoke College faculty meeting the day before results were released to staff and students.
In the meeting, E.C.S. employees attempted to quell fears about the report’s findings by stating that the Bartlett dorm would be dangerous only with a lifetime’s exposure to the chemicals found inside of it (though they acknowledged that it was found to have unacceptable cancer risk: at least one excess cancer death per 10,000 people).
“You need to give us confidence that the buildings we work in are safe,” responded one professor at the meeting.
“I’m tired of receiving e-mails from my students asking how to handle breast cancer at age 20,” pleaded another.
Until January, the E.P.A. offered a hotline for people exposed to carbon tetrachloride to request further information about any exposure they thought they might have had. Concerned Roanoke College professors or students could have used it to get medical guidance and request an investigation. The E.P.A.-hotline contact, Emilia Echeveste Briseño, eventually returned my calls to explain that she is no longer allowed to have any external communications. It’s been that way, she says, since “the transition” to Donald Trump’s second presidency began.
At the C.D.C., several of the employees who had been tasked with ensuring cancer clusters were investigated have been fired in the past 100 days. “Most of the people working on Trevor’s Law [the legislation that broadened the definition of cancer cluster to include multiple kinds of tumors] were let go,” says Trevor Schaefer, the pediatric brain-cancer survivor and activist after whom the law is named.
Without help from the school, the state, and, as of January 20, the federal government, the search for answers about the mysterious spate of cancers at Roanoke College is nearing a standstill.
One week ago today, and nearly 15 years into remission, Margaret Burke received a call from her doctor, telling her she had liver cancer—one of the diseases most linked to carbon-tetrachloride exposure.
“When you talk about the universe and what plans there are,” she says, fighting back tears, “it’s a really challenging system to navigate. You just never know what’s going to be thrown at you.”
She leaves me with one simple request for the college: “To not deny and turn their heads.”
Clara Molot is the Investigations Editor at Air Mail
