Eve Mary Verde Testimony to the Board of Radiation Effects Research
Given July 29, 2004
Updated October 2021
My name is Eve Mary Verde. I am a Utah native and grew up in Carbon County – 120 miles Southeast of Salt Lake City. When I was a young child, the “Big C” was rarely talked about, but it was a disease that began impacting my life even before I started school. As I played with my close friend and next-door neighbor, I recall vividly the fear I felt for my five-year-old friend, whose mother was dying of breast cancer. I had no idea what a “radical mastectomy” was; I only knew that it must be something horrible because I saw how ill she was and heard my parents discussing how difficult it was going to be for the father of this family, who would soon be left to raise three small children.
That was my first introduction to cancer. Little did I know that additional occurrences would become commonplace in my small community of fewer than 10,000 people, where the incidences of cancer continue to be too numerous to count. I can tell you, however, that in my immediate family of four, every one of us was a victim of cancer – my father died of brain cancer in 1988. After my father was diagnosed, I researched brain cancer and learned that less than two percent of all brain cancers start in the brain – yet the doctors felt certain that this was the primary source of his cancer and could not find it anywhere else in his body. I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 45 in 1995. In 2005 I feared that I was once again facing cancer when numerous doctors told me that I most likely had ovarian cancer. This diagnosis, fortunately, turned out to be benign, but, once diagnosed with cancer, the fear of a reoccurrence never leaves you, no matter how many years go by.
In 1999, my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. In 2004, my 57-year-old brother was also diagnosed with colon cancer. His wife died of endometrial cancer in 2011, at the age of 64. He died a sudden and unexpected death this past June, but currently his 23-year-old granddaughter is currently undergoing tests to determine whether the tumors in her breast are benign or malignant.
My father and his nine siblings were born and raised in Carbon County – some of them died having never traveled outside of the area. Five weeks after my dad died of brain cancer, his sister died of leukemia. Another sister died four years later of colon cancer. His oldest brother also died of leukemia. My mother had three siblings. Her oldest sister died of brain cancer. Her youngest brother had melanoma and died of bladder cancer in 2007. His twin sister had colon and breast cancer and died in 2019. Her father died of lung cancer.
In a close circle of friends, my best friend’s husband had kidney cancer before he was 60; her sister’s husband died of melanoma and then this sister died of a rare cancerous lung disease less than one week following diagnosis. Nearly every household in the neighborhood I grew up in has at least one incident of cancer; sometimes numerous family members such as mine have had cancer. Shortly after my brother’s diagnosis, a friend who stopped by to see him asked if he had considered moving out of his current neighborhood, pointing out that nearly every house on the block had someone who had had either colon, breast or brain cancer.
In the past few years, the cancer history of the 14 people in my immediate work group reads like this: a co-worker died of multiple myeloma; my boss’s mother died of breast cancer; the husband of one of my co-workers was diagnosed with melanoma and a very aggressive type of breast cancer, following a bout with testicular cancer 23 years before; the mother of another co-worker was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and her father currently has prostate cancer. It should be noted that less than two percent of all breast cancers occur in men.
Dr. Seymour Jablon, former staff director for the medical follow-up agency for the National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences, reported several years ago that the risk of breast cancer from radiation exposure is greatest in girls between 10 and 19 at the time of exposure. I have so many friends and acquaintances that fit into this category that have had breast cancer that I can’t begin to count all of them.
When I hear the American Cancer Society quote the statistics that one out of four people will experience cancer in their lifetime, I want to know where this is the case, because in Carbon County and the state of Utah, it seems much higher.
During the 1950s and ’60s when our government was conducting nuclear testing in Nevada, I recall our teachers and government telling us to “go out and watch this historical event.” It was historical, alright – and now, as our government continues to hide the facts and shirk responsibility for its actions, I’m sure there are more than just a few who are glad to see that the “evidence” is dying. The officials who decided that only those cancer victims who lived in Southern Utah should be compensated obviously have not been personally affected by cancer. Not only should cancer victims in the entire state of Utah be compensated for our government’s actions – the entire nation should be. It’s not “weapons of mass destruction” in other countries that need be feared – it’s our government’s weapons that have killed our own.
Now, the administration would add “insult to injury” by attempting to renew testing again in Nevada – let’s learn from the mistakes from the past and prevent this from happening again in the future.