Among the 1.2 million American citizens living in mountaintop removal mining counties in central Appalachia, an additional 60,000 cases of cancer are directly linked to the federally sanctioned strip-mining practice.
That is the damning conclusion in a breakthrough study, released last night in the peer-reviewed Journal of Community Health: The Publication for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. Led by West Virginia University researcher Dr. Michael Hendryx, among others, the study entitled "Self-Reported Cancer Rates in Two Rural Areas of West Virginia with and Without Mountaintop Coal Mining" drew from a groundbreaking community-based participatory research survey conducted in Boone County, West Virginia in the spring of 2011, which gathered person-level health data from communities directly impacted by mountaintop mining, and compared to communities without mining.
"A door to door survey of 769 adults found that the cancer rate was twice as high in a community exposed to mountaintop removal mining compared to a non-mining control community," said Hendryx, Associate Professor at the Department of Community Medicine and Director of West Virginia Rural Health Research Center at West Virginia University. "This significantly higher risk was found after control for age, sex, smoking, occupational exposure and family cancer history. The study adds to the growing evidence that mountaintop mining environments are harmful to human health."
Bottom line: Far from simply being an environmental issue, mountaintop removal is killing American residents.
"This research in the Coal River Valley, along with the recent birth defects research in Appalachia and other peer reviewed science, is providing evidence of the long term effects of human exposure to mountaintop removal," said Coal River Valley resident and coalfield leader Bo Webb, who participated in the study. "Again, I urgently call upon the United States government to intervene and address this health crisis, place an immediate moratorium on mountaintop removal and stop this needless killing of our citizens."
As a tree-sit protest in the Coal River Valley enters a new week to stop the strip mining operations at a former Massey Energy and current Alpha Natural Resources site, the New York Times is reporting today that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a key supporter of absentee coal companies and lobbies, reported "operating income of $1,363,916" from a coal brokerage firm.
Last month, delivering a new study on the link between birth defects and mountaintop removal mining, Appalachian leaders went to Washington, DC to call on President Obama, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, Department of Health and Human Services chief Kathleen Sebelius and Attorney General Eric Holder to enact an immediate moratorium on all mountaintop removal mining operations in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia until the Center for Disease Control and/or other federal regulatory agencies make a complete assessment of the spiraling health and human rights crisis related to mountaintop removal mining.
According to the new study: "The odds for reporting cancer were twice as high in the mountaintop mining environment compared to the non mining environment in ways not explained by age, sex,smoking, occupational exposure, or family cancer history." The study found:
Surface water and ground water around MTM activity are characterized by elevated sulfates, iron, manganese, arsenic, selenium, hydrogen sulfide, lead, magnesium, calcium and aluminum; contaminates severely damage local aquatic stream life and can persist for decades after mining at a particular site ceases [18, 20]. In addition, elevated levels of airborne particulate matter around surface mining operations include ammonium nitrate, silica, sulfur compounds, metals, benzene, carbon monoxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and nitrogen dioxide [21, 22].
Citing extremely high levels of uterine and ovarian, skin, urinary, bone, brain, and others forms of cancers, the study additionally noted:
Arsenic, for example, is an impurity present in coal that is implicated in many forms of cancer including that of skin, bladder and kidney [31, 36]. Cadmium is linked to renal cancer [34]. Diesel engines are widely used at mining sites, and diesel fuel is used for surface mining explosives, coal transportation and coal processing; diesel exhaust has been identified as a major environmental contributor to cancer risk.
Despite the deadly consequences, mountaintop removal mining in central Appalachian only provides 5-8 percent of national coal production.
More information on the Appalachian leaders call for a MTR Moratorium Now can be found here.
Frances Beinecke: Obama Administration Delays Life-Saving Smog Standards
Coal vs. Environment – Soledad O'Brien Explores Both Sides of Mountaintop Removal
EPA Provides Final Guidance on Mountaintop Removal Mining
Sen. Manchin Maintains Lucrative Ties to Family-Owned Coal Company
EPA guidance on mountaintop removal falls short, enviro group says
This toxic stuff makes people sick most of their lives and kills them early.
It lowers IQ levels. But then the righe wing likes that. It makes those people
more dependent and more managable for the 30 yrs of their productive life.
After that, they are of no useful value anyhow in the narrow view if a pure
profit taker. It is perfect for the wealthy few.
Now, a bunch of bleeding heart liberals want to mess it all up by wanting to free
these people from this sickness. What is the matter with them?????
ashes down in the coal furnace. Then the big shovel scraping across the cement
basement floor scooping coal to throw in the furnace. The acrid smell of sulpher
and fumes from the hot ashes removed from the furnace permeated the air from
through the floor. We had it good. Many neighbors had coal stoves in the living
room and kitchen. The toxic fumes were a way of life. Teberculosis was normal
for aging people. Black lung had not been named yet. The people in these areas
are still living in that ennvironment. After school or sports I carried buckets of
ashes out to spread on the cinder driveway and buckets of water in from the
hand pump on our front porch. It was a normal life. A great grandparent was
a very rare person. That is what the extreme right wing wants to relegate us
all down to. Don't let them do it. DAMN IT ALL TO HELL, PLEASE!!!
Self-reported? A (as in one?)community with mountain-top removal and A (as in one other)community without?
Somebody needs to 'peer review' the peers, it appears.
And since I don't want to shell out the $35.00 for the privilege of reading the report, I guess I'll have to remain skeptical.
http://greenplanetethics.com/wordpress/mountaintop-removal-mining-man-made-disasters-causes-and-effects-part-3/
We keep voting these people in so, unfortunately, a lot of people will have to debilitated and die before there is a public outpouring for the same regulations that we are about to slash.
We the public, through our voting choices, are once again demonstrating a failure to exercise a sense of concern for our own and more tragically, future generations.
Because no one can really isolate the direct connection between mountain removal and cancer, there is no acountability. This is just the beginning of the problems that are to ensue. No one can destroy their country and go and retreat in a safe place whether in the same or another country. When the mudslides begin in this area, every corporation should be brought to trial for any deaths caused as well as pay for the devastation and then be sent to prison.
The Pro-Pollution for Profit Lobby is not something that is outside of government. They install people into government positions by donating massive amounts of money to campaigns, or buying off politicians through lobbying, etc. They _are_ government.
I call them the Pro-Pollution for Profit Lobby because they could easily be profiting _without_ polluting, but investing in solar, wind, wave, geothermal, but instead they choose to commit crimes for their profit. They spend millions of dollars convincing you that the wars in the middle east are about democracy and not oil, but when have you ever seen the people of Iraq vote to decide if the U.S. should be occupying their country?
The Pro-Pollution for Profit Lobby cares about one thing - profit. They don't care if they kill children for profit (which they do with coal ash, pollution, wars in the middle east). They are engaged in crimes against humanity and in the very near future, everyone will understand this all too clearly as they watch the disastrous consequences of Global Climate Change unfolding before their eyes.
This is something the Pro-Pollution for Profit Lobby has made certain of... that you cannot turn on your computer or get to work without using coal. The Pro-Pollution for Profit Lobby don't simply _ask_ you to choose their polluting product over something else that's cleaner.
If you live in society today, you _must_ pollute. If we had the freedom to choose between clean and dirty products, the only people that would choose the dirty option would be those working in the dirty industry.
Because of the Pro-Pollution for Profit Lobby, you don't have a choice. Your freedom to breath clean air has been stripped from you by the Pro-Pollution for Profit criminals.
Notice how they didn't provide the actual number of cases and the article link is hidden behind a pay wall without even an abstract (most scientific papers do have published abstracts). Considering all the agendas driving this "science", one has to wonder whether this is just another scare article for political objectives.
(2) seeing as you haven't read the study or seen an abstract, please don't say things like "only a small % of the 769 actually have cancer" - and just go with the results actually reported - that significantly more near MTR have cancer...
(3) most scientific articles are hidden "behind a pay wall" - create an account to see the abstract (usually). industry "science" from Big Coal is free probably because no one would pay for made-up PR materials veiled as science
(4) I object to your apparent belief that there are "agendas" behind finding out where sources of cancer are - when it appears your agenda is to discredit anything that speaks ill of strip mining (which is in fact a political objective). There's just as much notoriety for these scientists if they had published a report saying there is NO difference in cancer rates between MTR sites and other sites! Whichever way the data fell, these scientists were going to make the front page!
(5) one last question- who WOULD you believe about cancer rates in Appalachia/coal country?
People were dying from coal production and its by-products a hundred fifty years ago, if not more. This has nothing to do with an agenda. Don't believe me? Go rub some mercury, thorium and arsenic on your skin. Put it in your water. See what happens.