Kennedy Discusses Colorectal Cancer Screening Under 45

Kennedy Jr resumes. And let's take it straight to our audience.

We have Love, he is a colorectal surgeon.

Thank you for taking my question. Uh, Secretary Kennedy, as a colorectal surgeon, I'm increasingly seeing impact of colorectal cancer in younger and younger patients. We do screening, average risk screening, in patients, uh,

at 45 or above, but we still lack an effective way of identifying younger adults who may benefit from earlier screening.

What role should HHS play in funding research into risk stratification tools and biomarkers to develop a targeted, uh, screening strategy for patients under 45?

Um, we are right now... First of all, uh, yeah, thank you for your question, and it's, uh, it's a really important one right now.

We're seeing an explosion in all cancers in young people, and particularly soft tissue cancers.

But more than that, most alarming probably is this giant increase in colorectal cancers, which, um, were essentially, as you know, unknown in children in previous generations. We're seeing them a lot, a lot now.

We are, um, in the process of, um, of, uh, uh, developing very, very rigid screening recommendations for young people with colorectal cancers. We're also looking at causation. Uh, it, it clearly... This is research that should've been done by NH, uh, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. It's clearly related to

environmental changes, to some kind of an environmental insult, almost certainly from the food.

But also, it may be linked to pesticides in the food.

Not only ultra-processed food, which is obliterating our metabolic systems, but also pesticides. And we're seeing some of the highest rates in the agricultural states. Like, Iowa today has the fastest growing cancer rate in the world, the fastest growing cancer rate in the history of the world.

Um, the second highest is Kentucky, and it's in the agricultural center, um, parts of those states where we're seeing it.

Uh, so there may be a, um, a pesticide link.

We are studying that now at the National Toxicity Program.