Permitted water pollution discharges and population cancer and non-cancer mortality: toxicity weights and upstream discharge effects in US rural-urban areas.

Background: The study conducts statistical and spatial analyses to investigate amounts and types of permitted surface water pollution discharges in relation to population mortality rates for cancer and non-cancer causes nationwide and by urban-rural setting. Data from the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Discharge Monitoring Report (DMR) were used to measure the location, type, and quantity of a selected set of 38 discharge chemicals for 10,395 facilities across the contiguous US. Exposures were refined by weighting amounts of chemical discharges by their estimated toxicity to human health, and by estimating the discharges that occur not only in a local county, but area-weighted discharges occurring upstream in the same watershed.

The relationship between toxics release inventory discharges and mortality rates in rural and urban areas of the United States.

Background: Potential environmental exposures from chemical manufacturing or industrial sites have not been well studied for rural populations. The current study examines whether chemical releases from facilities monitored through the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) program are associated with population mortality rates for both rural and urban populations.

Methods: We used the TRI database, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention age-adjusted mortality data, and additional county-level covariate data to conduct a national study at (N = 3,142) of the association between amounts of on-site TRI air and water releases for the years 1988-2006 and total age-adjusted mortality rates for the years 1999-2006, after controlling for the effects of other risk variables.

The association between mountaintop mining and birth defects among live births in central Appalachia, 1996-2003.

Birth defects are examined in mountaintop coal mining areas compared to other coal mining areas and non-mining areas of central Appalachia. The study hypothesis is that higher birth-defect rates are present in mountaintop mining areas. National Center for Health Statistics natality files were used to analyze 1996-2003 live births in four Central Appalachian states (N=1,889,071).

Pollution sources and mortality rates across rural-urban areas in the United States.

Purpose: To conduct an assessment of rural environmental pollution sources and associated population mortality rates.

Methods: The design is a secondary analysis of county-level data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Agriculture, National Land Cover Dataset, Energy Information Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US Census, and others. We described the types of pollution sources present in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties and examined the associations between these sources and rates of all-cause, cardiovascular, respiratory, and cancer mortality while controlling for age, race, and other covariates.

A geographical information system-based analysis of cancer mortality and population exposure to coal mining activities in West Virginia, United States of America.

Cancer incidence and mortality rates are high in West Virginia compared to the rest of the United States of America. Previous research has suggested that exposure to activities of the coal mining industry may contribute to elevated cancer mortality, although exposure measures have been limited. This study tests alternative specifications of exposure to mining activity to determine whether a measure based on location of mines, processing plants, coal slurry impoundments and underground slurry injection sites relative to population levels is superior to a previously-reported measure of exposure based on tons mined at the county level, in the prediction of age-adjusted cancer mortality rates.