Asthma Boulevard

July 10, 2024

Pollution at sunset

(The Atlantic) – Living and breathing in Southern California’s pollution corridor

Franco can still map Wilmington’s refineries, and still remembers the chemicals they’d release into the sky. At 28, after moving back to California, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. When she was in her 30s, former high-school classmates started dying. Then Franco developed another cancer: acinic cell carcinoma, a rare cancer of the salivary glands. Doctors sliced open the skin on the right side of her face to remove a tumor the size of a golf ball. Two years later, the tumor came back, and Franco underwent aggressive radiation treatment that made her feel like she got “punched in the jaw.” She was in her mid-50s. (Read More)