Pocono News Section

Woman at Center of Cancer Cluster Battle Dies

Woman at Center of Cancer Cluster Battle Dies - Friday, September 19, 2008 at 10:00PM EST

Reported by: Joe Holden
Friday, Sep 19, 2008 @ 10:00pm EST
HOMETOWN, SCHUYLKILL COUNTY- A woman at the center of a cancer-cluster battle dies. Betty Kester was instrumental in exposing a serious health problem in her Schuylkill County neighborhood.

“Hey, I'm not giving up on this, no way. They're going to carry me to my grave, you know,” she told Eyewitness News last month.

It would be the last time we heard from Betty Kester. The fiery lady from Hometown spent the final years of her life battling a rare cancer and a government she believed was playing cover-up. “Oh they lied, they lied. We caught them in lies, it's on tapes, and they're still lying, and you're living with it, hour by hour, minute by minute,” she said then.

Betty, who was in her 80s, wrapped herself in a fight to get to the bottom of Polycythemia-vera, a cancer of the blood.

Not a month ago, federal health officials confirmed Betty's home was in the middle of a cancer cluster. Her late husband was also sick with Polycythemia vera. Two people living with it under one roof, and experts said the odds were astronomical.

And folks like Betty, who have been battling these rare illnesses for years, have blamed the McAdoo Superfund site. They call it the smoking gun.

McAdoo Mayor Stephan Holly said, “In my personal opinion it would be like you eating a bowl of cereal, you know it's all down in your stomach and what they scraped out is what's between your teeth.”

That's how McAdoo's mayor described the government's containment of the toxic site. Betty added, “And it's still up there. The same place. And it hasn't been resolved yet.”

Testing of the environment hasn't happened. For Betty, having already known her fate, she just wanted answers. “I want to get it over with. It's do or die, right, shall we say,” she said last month.

Unfortunately, she never got those answers.