MTR COAL MINING UPS CANCER

Breaking: New Study Links Mountaintop Removal to 60,000 Additional Cancer Cases
Jeff Biggers, July 27, 2011 (AlterNet)

"Among the 1.2 million American citizens living in mountaintop removal [MTR] 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… the peer-reviewed [Journal of Community Health: The Publication for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention’s] Self-Reported Cancer Rates in Two Rural Areas of West Virginia with and Without Mountaintop Coal Mining…a groundbreaking [2011] community-based participatory research survey…which gathered person-level health data from communities directly impacted by mountaintop mining, and compared [it] to communities without mining."

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[Michael Hendryx, Associate Professor, Department of Community Medicine and Director of West Virginia Rural Health Research Center, West Virginia University] “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…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."