Group’s tours highlight pollution in West Oakland
California Watch’s Ali Winston writes that to increase awareness of both legacy and ongoing sources of toxins in their venerable neighborhood, the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project is offering “toxic tours” of the area’s most polluted locations.
Crane unloading shipping containers in West Oakland. Photo by oso via Flickr.The tour focuses on the neighborhood’s industrial legacy and includes West Oakland’s own federal Superfund site, where a chemical company “left a deposit of cancer-causing vinyl chloride in the soil and groundwater” as well as the largest recycling smelter west of the Mississippi and the docks where lines of cargo ships and big rigs sit idling every weekday as they wait for containers to be loaded and unloaded.
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In their series “Shortened Lives,” Suzanne Bohan and Sandy Kleffman profiled people from different (though nearby) ZIP codes, finding wide disparities in their expected life spans, based on where they live, their social status and the toll of chronic stress. The series explains the effect these disparities have on health care costs, as well as how they are caused and how they might be addressed. Bohan and Kleffman wrote about the project in a piece for AHCJ members and we have included additional resources for those interested in exploring disparities in health care in their own communities.
New CDC tool tracks environmental health
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have created what they refer to as an online Environmental Public Health Tracking Network, a complex tool designed to aggregate, link, combine and monitor environmental health-related data streams from participating programs, including local health departments, NASA, the USGS, the EPA and several health data oriented organizations.
The network is active in California, Connecticut, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, and New York City. There are plans to expand it to five more states this summer, and the CDC hopes to eventually implement it across the country.
In its press release the CDC provides an anecdote demonstrating the system’s possible advantages:
The Utah Department of Health received a call from a citizen concerned about cases of cancer in his neighborhood. In the past, a similar call would have prompted a study that would have taken up to a year to complete, with most of that time spent waiting for data. In less than a day, the Utah Tracking Program was able to let this resident know that the likelihood of cancer in his area was no greater than in the state as a whole.
The network provides information about health effect data, environmental hazard data, exposure data and more.
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Health Journalism 2010, AHCJ's annual conference, features a world-class program with story ideas, sources, stronger reporting skills, chances to meet newsmakers and network with other journalists.
- Health and education: Covering these intersecting beats
- Reporting on the business of health care
- Health reporting resources for journalists on state and local government beats
- Shortened Lives: How location, lifestyle affect health
- Covering a complex story for the long haul
- Aging in the 21st Century: Presentations and tip sheets
- AHCJ calls for better information from Joint Commission Web site
