Within months of being soaked with a glyphosate herbicide while working on a cell tower maintenance crew, Tennessee teenager Arden Allison developed a tumor that grew into what he described as “this massive alien sucking the life off of me.”
Arden was 17 when he landed a job maintaining cell towers across the Midwest. According to his mother, Serene Allison, writing in RealClear Health, his duties included spraying weeds around tower sites with Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide first made by Monsanto, now owned by Bayer.
“I didn’t realize the danger,” Arden said in a recent interview on CHD.TV. During the two months he spent “mowing, weedeating and spraying around all the cell towers and access roads,” he said he experienced “several different big exposures of glyphosate.”
The worst came when a backpack sprayer malfunctioned. After Arden climbed over a fence, “the lid popped off” the sprayer. He was “completely doused … with glyphosate,” he said. The chemical soaked his neck, shoulders and upper body.
Wearing a tank top and without access to a shower, Arden rinsed off with a water bottle and finished his workday. He said the company didn’t provide protective gear.
“I was told it was … absolutely fine,” he said. But the exposure happened on a hot day when his “pores were open” and his body soaked up “all those chemicals.”
His mother said co-workers assured her son that glyphosate “wasn’t dangerous” because it was “just a regular pesticide.”
The exposure occurred in the fall of 2015. Just months later — five weeks after marrying his high school sweetheart in February 2016 — Arden was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma.
‘What’s happened out there?’ mom asked as healthy son deteriorated
Before taking the cell tower maintenance job, Arden was a healthy teenager who had been homeschooled, graduated at 16 and quickly entered the workforce.
He said he grew up in the rural “boondocks of Tennessee country,” where “there was nobody spraying any chemicals.”
When Arden returned from working out of state, his mother quickly noticed something was wrong.
“He’s always been a positive Pete kind of guy,” Serene said. “But immediately when he came home, I’m like, ‘What’s happened out there on the road?’”
Her tall, athletic son had grown pale and was losing weight rapidly. “He was getting thinner by the day,” she said.
He also developed persistent itching, night sweats and a scratchy throat. Eventually, one side of his face, neck and chest swelled dramatically.
Arden said the swelling corresponded with where the glyphosate had soaked into his body.
“I only … had an exposure, like an extreme exposure, in this area,” he said, pointing to his neck and shoulder. “I never had any cancerous lymph nodes in my whole lymphatic system besides … right here.”
Hellbound and Down 