Feeling good

[self_referent]

The CAC meeting today was excellent. It was packed - the mayor, the editor of the local paper, and various business owners and lots of plant managers were there. I bonded with several managers. One of them was really pissed off about the Chronicle reports - he said that they'd get less of a bad rap if they went around shooting people instead of

Comments

Epidemiologist on hand?

[haydensphere]

I wonder if an epidemiologist around the Houston area could help? There are many variables to control for (or scale factors to introduce), when comparing disease rates among different populations: age structure of the population, ethnicity, socio-economic class, weather variables, regional diet, diagnostic biases, access to and utilization of the health care system, and other environmental and social and genetic factors. Some of this data may have been already collected, at least for some cancers.

Re: Epidemiologist on hand?

[self_referent]

In the mid-20th century, a woman affiliated with one of the medical centers around here published a paper that showed that air pollution caused the greatest increase in chronic disease in areas to which it was carried by the wind (not necessarily in neighborhoods adjacent to the plants themselves).

Taiwan has a petrochemical complex that is less regulated than the one here, and people are far less mobile in Taiwan, over their lifetimes, and a Harvard researcher has found a correlation between childhood leukemia and proximity to the plants, but not with brain cancer and proximity.

An organization exists here that is supposed to be doing epidemiological research, but curiously enough, it focuses on wealthy, relatively clean cities such as Boston (as well as dirty ones like LA, etc.) Also, it only conducts non-cancer research here, which is odd. There's no recent, hard epidemiological research for serious chronic disease here.