Posted on 09/10/2005 5:03:04 AM PDT by Bob Eimiller
excerpt...
I remember my first visit to the state, which I grew to love because of its warm, good-hearted people. Incredible folks! It was 1979 and I was there to report on the toxic contamination and a cancer rate that had reached epidemic proportions in the corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The most highly toxic compounds known to mankind had been thrown willy-nilly in the bayous and in inadequate land pits or pumped deep beneath the ground when they didn't simply drain into the Mississippi.
I stayed with a man named Dave Ewell whose family plantation was in ruins due to the toxics. Known as "Devil's Swamp," the woods reeked of creosote and solvents. Not a bird in sight. From the creek came silvery chemicals. There were cattle bones nearby. No more turtles. I visited a poor black man across the way whose coffee table held his only consolation -- a Bible. His wife had recently died when a waft of smoke erupted from an incinerator.
In New Orleans, women complained that airborne caustics near the refineries were causing their nylons to dissolve.
No state ever has had as many pressing problems of contamination. On cancer maps, this stretch is the blackest. Some years New Orleans has led the world in lung-cancer rates in black males and in one study of white males, 38 of Louisiana's 64 counties were in the nation's top ten percent! About 33 percent of those in New Orleans could expect to develop cancer. Remember, this was twenty years ago -- before cancer rates increased. For white males it was a jolting 40 percent!
This is a hidden evil -- one brought to light as the toxics now resurface in the floodwaters we all see on television.
I smelled the chlorinated compounds. I saw the way nature had been mauled. I met the victims.
The state's very motto, the brown pelican, had disappeared....
snip
When I returned to Devil's Swamp in the 1980s an uncanny black cloud hung low over the swamp, while the rest of the sky was clear.
The "Big Easy" should be buried... the city can rest in peace.
Wow.
The Soviet Union had similar problems. It was also run by the first cousins of the RATS who have run LA for 60 years. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere.
Socialism is the goal, Enviromentalism is but a tool to achieve that goal.
That's not in New Orleans...it's between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, mostly...the petrochem plants. Places once run by people like Hooker Chemical (the lovely guys at Love canal, who had a long rep of not being very good neighbors).
My dad and my brother used to work in the hazmat cleanup business around there...there was always plenty of work...
Send this to Rush, Drudge, Snow, etc......!
Could you provide a link to this article? Thanks in advance.
It's part of a religious article with apocalyptic leanings...so be aware of it.
http://www.spiritdaily.com/hurricanespirit.htm
I visited friends just south of Baton Rouge in the late 60s, you could see and smell it then.
Although not in NO, it's probably a good description of the septic/toxic marinade most of NO is currently steeping in, and will continue to steeep in for about two months. That's why the inundated NO residential areas will have to be bulldozed and won't be capable of being rebuilt as residential areas.
Uh, "Devil's Swamp" is nowhere near New Orleans (aka "the Big Easy"). It is north of Baton Rouge.
Sounds like the Ewells themselves contibuted to the problem. Who leaves a dead cow lay? And not bother to have it hauled away or buried.
After re-reading this, I'm suspicious. I call BS.
Purpose of article wasn't to talk about science...it was about God calling people to repent and people rejecting God, and how that concentrates evil...Brown sees the pollution in the petrochem corridor of Louisiana as a metaphor and an actual extention, perhaps, of the evil people have embraced from turning their backs on what is good and holy.
The area is at the bottom of a very long drainage, and there's lots of heavy petrochem processing going on and has been for years. And the cancer rate is high, for a variety of reasons, but pollution probably has played some role. A lot of the pollution predated what we know now...and back when the fines were low, some companies preferred to pay fines to changing practices...
But don't read this as a science article. It's an opinion piece by a religious writer.
As I recall, the rate of OCCURRENCE of cancer is NOT higher than the national average---the rate of DEATH from cancer IS higher, which is largely attributable to a large number of poor and uneducated people who don't seek medical help early enough.
The issue was studied to death back in the early 1990's by a joint task force of state, federal, and university resources, and the data was pretty conclusive.
OK, I can accept that. I see that a lot. I sure don't know why they choose those types of examples.
They are building their opinions on shifting sands. It reflects badly on the writers. Actually, it makes them look stupid.
A different view.
Did You Hear?
Good News from Cancer Alley
by Michael Gough
Everyone knows that cancer rates are sky-high along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. How could it be otherwise? Louisiana is one of the three states with the most "industrial toxic emissions." Chemical refineries line the banks of the river that, loaded with the effluent of the farms and factories of the Midwest in addition to whatever it picks up in Louisiana, is the source of New Orleans's drinking water. No wonder the area's called "cancer alley."
The only problem is that what "everyone knows" just isn't true. A recent article in the Journal of the Louisiana Medical Society compares the incidence (occurrence of new cases) of cancers in five regions of southern Louisiana to national incidence rates. Two of those regions -- the river parishes and the New Orleans area, sources of more than 80 percent of the state's toxic emissions -- make up cancer alley
The article makes a total of 186 comparisons between cancer incidence rates in the alley and national rates. In 90 percent of the comparisons, incidence in the alley is comparable to national incidence. In 7 percent of the comparisons, incidence is lower in the alley than in the rest of the United States. Incidence is higher in only 3 percent of the comparisons.
Even the five comparisons that show elevated cancer incidence in the alley don't point to environmental causes. Smoking is the likely culprit for high lung cancer rates in white men and women in New Orleans and in white men in the river parishes (lung cancer is not elevated among blacks). Larynx cancer, which is elevated in white men in New Orleans, "is diagnosed more frequently among those who both smoke and drink," and many visitors to New Orleans remark on the prevalence of such conduct. The higher rate for total cancers in white men in New Orleans is a product of the high incidence of lung and larynx cancers.
In short, there is no cancer alley. Digestive and urinary tract cancers are not elevated despite claims by the Environmental Defense Fund and Greenpeace that drinking water from the Mississippi River causes those cancers. Reproductive system cancers are not elevated despite the recent hoopla about manufactured chemicals being "environmental estrogens" or "endocrine disrupters" and causing those cancers. In fact, breast, uterine and ovarian cancers occur at average rates in black women and at below average rates in white women in the alley. The incidence of prostate cancer is lower than the national average for black males in both New Orleans and the river parishes and for white males in New Orleans.
A central tenet of what is called "environmental equity" is that poor people and minorities suffer most from environmental exposure to hazardous substances. Incomes throughout Louisiana are below national levels, but the article concludes that "cancer incidence in South Louisiana is generally comparable to or lower than" national rates. No cancer occurs at higher than the national average rate in blacks who live in the alley.
Although the incidence of cancer is lower in southern Louisiana, mortality rates from cancers in black males and females and in white males (but not white females) are higher there than in the rest of the United States. The article asks, "Is cancer a more virulent disease in South Louisiana than nationally? Is the health care system-including both screening and treatment-not accessible enough?" Those questions are very different from ones about carcinogenic rivers. Answering them should improve public health. Blathering on about a "cancer alley" won't.
The cancer alley paper that appeared in the Journal of the Louisiana Medical Association had also been submitted to the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Cancer and Cancer Causes and Control, all of which have larger circulations. All decided not to publish it, at least in part because it reported on cancer in only one state. Evidently, the national publicity about the cancer alley was insufficient to convince the journal editors that the paper would interest a wide audience.
The "cancer alley" is an environmental myth. A myth doesn't lie down and die. Unless the public learns that science has demolished a myth, the myth lives on as something "everyone knows." More people would have learned about the science, had a more prestigious journal published the paper. None did. The myth lives on; the facts remain obscure.
Michael Gough is director of science and risk studies at the Cato Institute.
Why? Doesn't mean it's not all true.
I just wanted people to realize, lest they be surprised. I read Spirit Daily every day, myself...
(Try to stay rapture ready myself, although I don't lean towards believing in a pre-trib rapture. This is what Christians are called to do!)
I have a vague memory of that study...I was thinking of the high incidence of smoking, bad diet, and the effects of the old methods of chlorination having an impact more than that, but I am sure, with there being a lot of working poor, with their tendencies not to get treatment until it's a crisis. that people don't get enough early treatment.
And if you ever had to use the clinics at Charity hospital (at least the way they were in the 70s and 80s) you would know at least one reason why people tended to put things off....
That would make a great tagline.
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