Report on health disparities glossed over pollution

Pollution is barely mentioned in the city's new and provocative health disparities report, covered in today's Courier-Journal. The word shows up twice, in a three paragraph passage about air quality. Oddly, it only touches on one kind of air pollution -- fine particles -- and concludes the air quality is the same across the city.

No mention of sulfur dioxide. No toxic dumps. No toxic air.

Remember toxic air? A decade ago Louisville was gripped in a bitter battle over its toxic air. A landmark air monitoring study completed in 2003 led to the adoption of the Strategic Toxic Air Reduction program in 2005, which featured a phased approach at corralling hazardous air pollutants.

The study found that for some chemicals at some air monitors in Louisville, risk levels from long-term exposure were hundreds of times higher than the state and EPA would consider safe. And the highest levels were found in western Louisville, where there is a concentration of chemical plants and other industries.

The final report back then predicted that, among the monitoring sites, there would be between 76 and 690 additional cancer cases per 1 million people from maximum exposure over a lifetime. For most of those monitoring locations, the numbers were higher than the EPA had previously estimated for anywhere in the United States.

The study did not find any immediate health concerns from pollution levels; rather, cancer and other health issues would accumulate in people over decades -- 70 years, in fact.

That's important because even though the STAR program has been in effect for a few years now, and toxic air levels have improved, there are likely many people who have lived near polluting industries for decades, and had been in fact breathing even higher levels of chemicals linked to cancer and other illnesses for all that time. The smokestacks were emitting even more hazardous air pollutants in the 90s and 80s and 70s.

So I cannot see how their cumulative risk associated with all that that past exposure would simply vanish from people's bodies with the adoption of the STAR program.

The health disparity study also makes the case that air pollution is spread equally around Jefferson County, suggesting there are no air quality hot spots. It does so by looking at just one type of air pollution, fine particle pollution. I can see how they came to that conclusion based on looking only at three or four monitoring stations. But none of those air monitors are located in eastern Jefferson County, say, along Floyds Fork, or up in Anchorage.

This this kind of dangerous soot is also associated with diesel fuel and exhaust, such as from trucks and trains and barges. There are a lot of those in our industrial areas, along the I-65 corridor and the Shawnee Expressway. There are two rail yards west of I-65, and trains are frequently coming in and out of Rubbertown. And as other cities have found, just living near a freeway, for example, can increase your health risks.

Germantown and Old Louisville, where people are said to live about a decade less than in St.Matthews and eastern Louisville, are also in the flight path of planes landing at one of the world's busiest cargo airports. Airplanes are also a source of localized toxic air pollution. In 2006, I reported on a study that found if Louisville International Airport were an industrial facility, it would have been one of the top two or three sources of the human carcinogen 1,3-butadiene, which had been deemed at the time to be among the most dangerous in the region's air.

The health disparities report also did not look at sulfur dioxide. Louisville has zone around the Mill Creek power plant that fails to meet the national standard for sulfur dioxide, which can cause restriction of the airways in the lungs and increased asthma symptoms.

There was nothing about living near toxic dumps, which can also make people sick. And we have some of those, too, most notably the Lees Lane Landfill in the Riverside Gardens community of western Louisville, which state and EPA officials acknowledge is not fully controlled right now. Yet it serves as an informal public park.

The report paints a valuable and stark picture of the health haves and have-nots in Louisville.

I just wish the authors had devoted a little more thought and ink to environmental health risks faced by this community, examining how they can contribute to health disparities along with such factors as poverty and education, in seeking to learn about why some of us are drawing the ultimate short straw.