NC State Poe Hall and Elevated Number of Cancer Cases

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Several years ago I remember following a story about a rare (and deadly) eye cancer that was found in dozens of people in Alabama and I think North Carolina. An Alabama woman who had been diagnosed with it was connected by someone in her network to another woman who had also been diagnosed with it. Both had attended Auburn University.

When the first woman mentioned to her doctor that she knew someone else who was also fighting the same cancer, her doctor was absolutely astonished because of how rare it was - literally one in a million.

The two women eventually learned of a third woman who also had that cancer. The third woman discovered she was in the same sorority at Auburn as one of the first two women, although a few years apart.

The three women decided to start a Facebook page to connect with others who had been diagnosed with that type of cancer to compare notes and offer support. Several more people who had all attended Auburn started coming out of the woodwork reporting that they too had been diagnosed with that extremely rare cancer. There was also another cluster in a town somewhere in North Carolina that appeared to be unrelated to the Auburn cluster.

The last I heard, researchers were looking into it but weren't able to pin it down to a specific building, activity, or organization at Auburn that the patients all had in common. It was just that they had all attended Auburn at some point over like a three-decade span.

Unfortunately I also remember hearing that one of the three original women had succumbed to the cancer.