I don’t think people give enough thought to the idea that the environment of a particular area might be a big contributing factor to the wide spread of certain diseases there. Seems like for a decade or more now, my wife would tell me about yet another person she grew up with who stayed in the area and who died of cancer in their 40s or 50s. She grew up in rural-ish Wisconsin half an hour east of Green Bay, where there has been a lot of industrial farming ever since she was a kid. I suspect the soil and ground water there have been polluted beyond belief.
I think a lot of it has to do with the folks there being conditioned to be prejudiced against environmental action, which, I will just leave it there. But I suspect they don’t believe that’s a real factor.