There are cancer causing contaminants in the air in Hamilton, St. Catharines, and other industrial cities, according to researchers at Mcgill University.

Benzene is known to cause acute myeloid leukemia or AML which is a cancer of the bone marrow or blood.

According to the associate medical officer of health in hamilton, the numbers in the study don’t tell the whole story.

Associate Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Bart Harvey says, “In Hamilton in and around 20 hamiltonians are diagnosed with AML, and if I can put that into context every year slightly more than 3,000 Hamiltonians are diagnosed with cancer.”

Not all the troubled neighborhoods were surrounded by industry in fact the area with the highest number of cases was in Westdale where it came in at 85 cases per million people a year the canadian average is 30.