Studies by Texas Cancer Registry find
18 ZIP codes with results above average

From the Houston Chronicle:

Yet each woman fits into a complex puzzle of cancer data that the Texas Department of State Health Services' Texas Cancer Registry has been studying for the past 10 years. Each year the database has grown until now epidemiological studies can include 10 years of cancer deaths and eight years of cancer cases.

From September 2001 to the present, the registry has conducted 51 studies in the Houston area, and 18 of those, or 35 percent, identified ZIP codes with cancer rates higher than should be expected when compared with statewide rates.

Of all the types of cancer, lung cancer was by far the most frequently found to be elevated. The registry detected higher rates of lung cancer in 24 ZIP codes — or 77 percent of all the ZIP codes with elevated levels.

Neil Carman, clean-air director for the environmental group Sierra Club, said he is surprised the test results had not been publicized before the Houston Chronicle analyzed cancer patterns turning up in these reports.

And for the first time, a pilot study is being initiated to try to link the registry's epidemiological data with possible environmental exposures.

"I've talked to citizens in Houston, and they have been wanting more research in light of all the air pollution in the Houston area," Carman said. "In the past, there seems to have been a history of ignoring these issues."

And, for me, here's some really disturbing news:

Lung cancer elevations also were detected in multiple ZIP codes in Pasadena (77502, 77503, 77506) and Houston (77049, 77015, 77017, 77044).

Click here for the rest.

I lived in the 77015 ZIP code area for the six years I was teaching in Baytown. The above excerpted article goes through all sorts of contortions to point out that nobody knows whether these lung cancer spikes are due to any environmental causes--smoking is mentioned repeatedly. But, after living there for so long, and because I'm not constrained by any journalistic ethics requiring me to be "balanced," I'll go out on a limb and just say that this has to be environmental. I smelled the gunk coming in from the plants almost every day I lived on that side of town; sometimes the noxious fumes were near-overpowering. I also know that the EPA, for many years, but especially in the Bush era, has relied on companies to self-report their toxic emission levels because the agency is so wildly underfunded that they simply don't have the manpower to check things out for themselves: because it costs a lot of money to reduce toxic emissions, there is a built-in incentive for companies to lie about the gunk they pump into the atmosphere. I already knew that I was breathing in deadly shit on Houston's east side. Now I know for sure that there are deadly consequences for many of my neighbors. And maybe for me, too. It's utterly screwy to hem and haw about whether these emissions are dangerous. While the powers that be "debate" the problem, tens of thousands of people are being poisioned. That really pisses me off.

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