(Radio Iowa) – Students from Northwestern College in Orange City are heading out this week for spring break — but their trips are working mission trips — not a chance to sit on a beach and soak up the sun. Northwestern director of admissions, Patrick Hummel says they 13 trips planned this year including four international trips Hummel says all the students volunteer for the trips and about 43 percent of graduates do a spring trip. He says students are working to help others and they benefit from being in places that are culturally different from their own and where they grew up.

He says students join teams and aren’t necessarily paired up with friends, so they get the added benefit of developing new friends on campus — and he says it connects them in new ways and in different ways.

(Red Oak, Iowa) – Police in Red Oak report three recent arrests. Authorities say 44-year-old Chase Michael Hill, of Red Oak, was arrested at around 7:45-p.m., Tuesday, on an active Adams County warrant for Failure To Appear on a traffic offense. Hill was transported to the Adams County Sheriff’s Office and held on a $600 cash-only bond. Red Oak Police arrested 42-year-old Penny Marie Griggs, of Red Oak, at around 6:23-p.m., Tuesday, for Driving While Suspended. Her bond was set at $491. And, at around 1-a.m. today (Wednesday), Red Oak Police arrested 37-year-old Jacob Wayne Dykes-Vargas, of Council Bluffs.

Dykes-Vargas was arrested on a Pottawattamie County warrant for Violation of Probation on on original Controlled Substance/2nd offense violation. Vargas was being held in the Montgomery County Jail on a $2,000 bond, while awaiting extradition to Pott. County.

(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa Cancer Registry is marking its 50th year and celebrating the fact cancer is much less deadly in Iowa today than in 1973 when the first report was published. Registry director Mary Charlton, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa, credits decades of advances in medicine, treatment and early screening technology.

“Cancer mortality is declining, and survival among people who are diagnosed with cancer is getting better as the years go by,” Charlton says. “So what used to be kind of a death sentence back in the ’70s versus now, we have over 160,000 Iowans living with a history of cancer and doing great.” Early detection is the best defense against cancer, she says. Fifty years ago, about ten-thousand cancer cases were being diagnosed each year statewide, while today, it’s more than 20-thousand.

While more Iowans are being told they have cancer than five decades ago, many more are now surviving the fight. “So things like breast cancer or prostate cancer, back in the 1970s, less than 75% of people diagnosed with those types of cancers survived at least five years,” Charlton says, “but now over 90% survive at least five years.” There was troubling news in the report, as new national rankings now show Iowa has the second highest rate of new cancer cases in the U-S.

“I was really surprised to see that we had climbed that high,” Charlton says. “We’re only behind Kentucky, which is down in the Tobacco Belt. They’ve been number-one for a long time and have a very high smoking rate. We do not have as high as smoking rate, but it does seem like we’re just high. We have high rates of lots of different types of cancers in our population and we’re really trying to figure out why that is and what we can do to address that.”

The annual report allows doctors and researchers to focus on how to prevent and treat cancer, she says, and it provides Iowans with the knowledge they need to get advance screening and improve survival rates across the board. “Breast, prostate, lung and colorectal cancers continue to make up almost half of all cancer cases in Iowa,” Charlton says. “In terms of cancer deaths, lung cancer continues to be the most common cause of cancer deaths, accounting for one out of every four cancer deaths in Iowa, with colorectal cancer and pancreatic cancer also in the top three.”

The report projects 20-thousand-800 Iowans will be diagnosed with cancer this year, an increase of 800 from last year. It also forecasts 62-hundred Iowans will die from cancer this year, a drop of 100 from a year ago. See the full report here: https://shri.public-health.uiowa.edu/