Study finds state's drinking water safe, cancer and coal mining unrelated

Jul 3 - Amelia Holliday The Hazard Herald, Ky.

With over 90 percent of Perry County already supplied with access to public drinking water, it's hard to imagine that anyone should be worried about drinking or using water that comes from their tap as those in Fort Branch and other small areas of Perry County have had to worry for years without access to city water.

The Kentucky Division of Water (DOW) set out over a decade ago to prove that the people of the Commonwealth shouldn't have any concerns about the water they drink by conducting a two-part study of public drinking water, and, according to the results, they seem to have proved just that.

"The DOW study was prompted in part as a result of recent studies that have suggested that exposure to elevated levels of heavy metals like arsenic and chromium in Appalachia contributes to the region's high cancer mortality rates," Bruce Scott, commissioner of the Kentucky Department for Environmental Protection, said. "Because of these expressed concerns, the agency conducted an extensive analysis of the quality of drinking water in all of Kentucky's public water systems."

The study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed or published, was conducted over a 12-year period, from 2000 to 2012, and reviewed 519 public water systems in the state, according to the study. Arsenic and chromium, which have been classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as known human carcinogens (cancer causing agents), were the two elements tested for in the study. The study found that not only were levels for these elements low, they were actually nonexistent in all samples analyzed.

The second part of the study concerned whether there is a relationship between incidences of cancer mortality in coal-producing regions and the production of coal itself as multiple studies have shown recently. According to a press release from DOW, the "study indicates that coal production does not appear to be a predictive tool for evaluating the incidence of cancer in a county" because the rates of cancer and cancer mortality do not differ greatly enough to find coal mining to be an indicator.

Dr. Michael Hendryx, professor and interim chair in the Department of Health Policy and Leadership at West Virginia University, is one of the leaders in the research concerning poor health and proximity to coal mining. Hendryx said while the second part of this study might say cancer rates are not linked to coal mining, he has published dozens of studies that show a correlation between mining, especially mountaintop removal mining, and poor health.

"We've done a series of peer-reviewed studies that have been published that show that people who live in the mountaintop mining areas in Appalachia have higher health problems in a variety of ways including some types of cancer, including lung cancer," Hendryx said.

Hendryx said from his research he has found other health problems are higher in coal-producing regions and those where mountaintop removal occurs, like COPD, lung disease, and heart disease as well as higher rates of birth defects.

"These have been published in peer-review journals, and the studies that just came out have not been subjected to that kind of scrutiny," he added.

Although much of Hendryx's research focuses on the coalfields of West Virginia, he said this does not mean the patterns he has documented cannot be applied to mountaintop removal mining in general since other factors were taken into account in the study, like economic levels and the health habits of the people in the communities.

"We usually see kind of a pattern of effects, of severe health problems in most of the areas where mountaintop removal takes place, and intermediate where other forms of mining take place. That's the pattern we've seen," he said.

Hendryx said the results of the DOW's study should be looked at with the knowledge that there is an immense amount of research that negates its results.

http://www.hazard-herald.com/ 

http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=29191573