Teen star has personal stake in cancer research
by Tyrone Beason
Seattle Times staff reporter

Backstreet Boy Kevin Richardson visited the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to do research for his foundation Just Within Reach: An Earth Foundation. Backstreet Boy Kevin Richardson had two good reasons to start a foundation dedicated to environmental-health education in December.

The 29-year-old singer's father, Jerald Wayne Richardson, died of colon cancer in 1991 at the age of 49. The elder Richardson had been a smoker, firefighter and iron-industry worker.

More recently, last October, the nation's largest spill caused by waste from coal mining happened on his home turf, Eastern Kentucky. More than 250 million gallons of "black water" spilled from a coal-waste-storage area in Martin County into streams and people's lawns, covering the area in sludge.

Richardson still gets tense talking about his dad's death and the spill, and says he's increasingly curious about the possible effects of environmental hazards on public health.

So yesterday, the teen star took a break from his group's world tour, which finished a two-concert stint at the Tacoma Dome last night, to visit Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and learn more about cancer and its possible links to pollution.

"What I learned here today is that they don't know a whole lot about it," Richardson said. "We're just going to have to keep digging."

His organization, Just Within Reach: An Earth Foundation, may team up with the National Geographic Society and other groups to produce an educational video for schoolchildren focusing on ways people can improve the environment.

Richardson said he also wants to do public-service announcements with Erin Brockovich, the inspiration behind the Julia Roberts movie dealing with a California woman's legal fight against a polluting utility company.

That film, along with another legal drama, John Travolta's "A Civil Action," involving industrial pollution and contaminated drinking water in New England, also helped inspire Richardson's crusade.

Richardson, who got married last June and recently bought a farm outside Lexington, Ky., said he's most concerned about the environmental legacy his generation leaves its children.

The reality, however, is that scientists lack definitive evidence supporting a link between exposure to pollution or waste and cancer.

"With environmental exposure, there's no doubt a subgroup of people who might be vulnerable," said cancer-prevention specialist Ruth Patterson, who met with Richardson at the center yesterday. But she added, "In terms of having a real direct link to cancer, it's difficult."

Source: Seattle Times

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