Doctor: coal regions produce high cancer rates
By John Hennen
In science, it is seen as a virtue to hold your views tentatively, rather than with certainty, and to express them with the requisite caveats and without emotion. It is also seen as admirable to change your mind, based upon the weight of new evidence.
—Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain
On April 10 about seventy-five students, faculty, and regional visitors gathered on the campus of Morehead State University for a presentation by one of the Appalachian region’s foremost experts on community health, Dr. Michael Hendryx. In terms of structure and style, the lecture and subsequent discussion were academic, measured, non-confrontational, and dignified. In terms of content, and potential long-term implications for the coal industry’s historic stranglehold on Eastern Kentucky, Hendryx’s research might be revolutionary. I hope so.
Michael Hendryx is an associate professor of community medicine and directs the Rural Health Research Center at West Virginia University. A PhD in Psychology (Northwestern, 1986), he arrived at WVU about five years ago after working on health policy issues at Washington State University. Perhaps inevitably, given the influence of the West Virginia coal industry on public policy and the state’s political economy, not to mention the longstanding debates around the potential health effects of coal, Hendryx began to educate himself about the industry’s most radically destructive practice, Mountaintop Removal mining (MTR).
As he recounted in a 2011 interview with Jeff Young of Public Radio’s “Living on Earth,” Hendryx began to question the public health consequences of Mountaintop Removal coal mining during a visit to Kayford Mountain, West Virginia, where legendary West Virginia environmental justice activist Larry Gibson introduced him to the physical and cultural devastation unleashed by MTR. “I saw huge trucks dumping rocks; I could feel the dust in my throat. It became a personal encounter. I could understand it.”
Academic work
Many who witness the awesome devastation by MTR respond with grassroots mobilization—lobbying, demonstrating, researching, petitioning, organizing, writing, singing—in order to wean Appalachian coal country off the cultural addiction to carbon and towards healthy renewable energy. These dedicated individuals bring their particular talents to the perpetual struggle for justice in the coal fields. Dr. Hendryx has responded to the systemic dilemmas generated by coal extraction with a rigorous research program whose findings strongly suggest that coal makes people sick. Really, really sick.
A study published by Hendryx and three colleagues in Environmental Research, for example, indicates a link between maternal exposure to mining’s toxic dust and contaminated water and high rates of birth defects in their children. Moreover, at least nineteen of the chemicals used in processing coal are carcinogens, and others are known to contribute to lung and heart damage. As reported in Mother Jones on June 22, 2011, Hendryx remarked that the “study ‘offers one of the first indications that health problems are disproportionately concentrated’ in mining areas . . .”
Speaking before the Kentucky House Committee on Health and Welfare in March of 2010, Hendryx testified that his research shows that rates of chronic heart, lung and renal failure mortality are higher in coal-producing areas “than in the rest of Appalachia or the nation, even after the rates have been adjusted for other factors such as smoking, age and education. . . .We have some evidence that the effects become stronger as the level of mining increases.”
Hendryx’s West Virginia research relies heavily on extensive household surveys collected in communities in close proximity to MTR; in communities where other forms of coal mining are practiced; and in non-coal producing communities. With breathtaking consistency (that’s not hyperbole—it’s an accurate description of audience reaction), the sophisticated statistical methodologies his studies employ reveal ascending rates of chronic lung and heart disease, cancers, and birth defects depending on the type of mining to which residents are exposed. Rates are lowest in non-coal regions, higher in “other” coal regions, and highest in MTR communities. No variation.
As a scientist, Hendryx is careful not to overstate the correlations he has found. Nor does he make sweeping, spectacular claims. At his Morehead visit, he stressed that he could not claim that the increased cancer rates are specifically attributable to households getting exposed to the toxic environment produced by MTR and other mining. But, he points out, they have to be caused by something.
If scientists were to test, develop and generally take-up Hendryx’s results, they could lead to revolutionary developments in public health policy, economic development strategies, and even politics as usual in Kentucky and West Virginia. To cite just one problem area for King Coal, the industry claims that coal contributes $80 billion annually to positive economic activity in the U. S. It’s a big number, but it begins to shrivel alongside projections that the coal’s health costs range from $170-$350 billion ($500 billion, according to a Harvard study), annually. In other words, not only is the mining process dangerous to all living things, it’s now a quantifiably bad deal in purely “rational” terms.
The folks gathered at Morehead on the evening of April 10 experienced the noblest feature of enlightened education—the stretching of our minds.
Dr. Hendryx has recently begun collecting surveys in Rowan, Elliott, and Floyd counties in Kentucky in order to expand his study. For more on the March 2010 testimony before the Kentucky House Committee on Health and Welfare, see “Hearing exposes coal’s multi-billion dollar public health cost,” KFTC.org, April 26, 2010.
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