Dr. Michael Hendryx, measuring mining’s toll on health | Living on Earth
►http://www.loe.org/blog/blogs.html?seriesID=1&blogID=17
This week the Journal of Community Health published a study that found people who live near mountaintop removal coal mines have cancer rates twice as high as people living elsewhere in Appalachia. Last month, a peer-reviewed study linked mountaintop removal mining to high rates of birth defects.
And in February, a study pegged the public health costs of coal in Appalachia at about $80 billion a year.
Aside from all being about coal, these studies have something else in common: they were all co-authored by Dr. Michael Hendryx, an associate professor of community medicine at West Virginia University. Since landing in West Virginia five years ago, Hendryx has been filling a void in medicine’s understanding of the health impacts of coal mining.
