COMMENT OF THE DAY: WE’RE FROM THE TEXAS MEDICAL CENTER AND WE’RE HERE TO HELP “Given all the refineries, industrial plants, chemical plants, railroads, stagnant swamps and cesspools, traffic pollution, and the like that plague this hellhole of a town, it is a freaking wonder that Houston doesn’t lead the nation in cancer cases.” [Random Poster, commenting on Today’s Odor in Baytown Is Brought to You by ExxonMobil]
Sign up for the Newsletter
I know! Can you believe we’re all even alive!
Well, petrochemical residue is the basis for pretty much every pharmaceutical available.
We couldn’t have modern medicine without the refinement of oil.
Well, an undetermined percentage of the population of Houston are zombies, and don’t forget the vibrant vampire community. So a lot of us are dead, thank you very much.
i thought the whole La Porte/pasadena/channelview did have a significantly higher rate of cancer?
I too feel I’ve learned of cancer clusters in our petro-complex. However, with so much of the effluent in the air (as opposed to the water-table & earth) any effects are less obvious, subtler, wide-ranging. We’re all frogs in the pot.
You’re both probably thinking of the study that the City sponsored about five years back. They yanked it from their website as soon as folks started reading beyond the Executive Summary. The geographic assumptions were inherently flawed (due to demographic biases and because prevailing wind patterns weren’t taken into account) and the statistical correlations turned out very weak. Even taking their headline conclusions and extrapolating them to an absurdly larger area than was studied, the net impact to the mortality rate was minimal, and probably statistically insignificant.