Louisiana officials have labeled President Biden’s recent use of the phrase “Cancer Alley” to describe Louisiana’s key industrial corridor as an unfair slam against the state.
U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy suggested that reported increases in cancer rates in the state was likely due to state residents’ higher incidence of cigarette smoking, of being overweight and of some viral infections. If such factors are taken into account in southeastern Louisiana, Cassidy said, the remaining unexplained cancer incidence may be much smaller.
Greg Bowser, president of the Louisiana Chemical Association, noted that the Louisiana Tumor Registry, which is operated by Louisiana State University’s School of Public Health, shows that cancer rates in the industrial corridor are on par with or lower than rates in other parts of the state.
“It was beyond disappointing to hear President Biden make a reference to ‘Cancer Alley,’ a misnomer of a name that is not rooted in fact,” Bowser said in a prepared statement.
But Kimberly Terrell, director of community outreach for Tulane University’s Environmental Law Clinic, challenged Cassidy’s notion that lifestyle factors such as smoking are more important than industrial pollution in driving cancer risks. Terrell is unaware of any recent or in-depth studies of the Cancer Alley region that support the senator’s claims.
“He seems to be focused on statewide averages instead of individual communities,” she told the Louisiana Record in an email. “Undoubtedly, there are more people in Louisiana who smoke cigarettes than live next to chemical plants, so smoking may play a bigger role in statewide cancer rates. But that’s precisely the problem – pollution burden is not evenly distributed across the state, the way smoking is (approximately) evenly distributed.”
Terrell claims U.S. Environmental Protection Agency studies have raised health concerns about the state’s industrial corridor.
“If you look at EPA data (specifically, the 2014 National Air Toxics Assessment and the 2019 Risk Screen Environmental Indicators microdata), it’s clear that the area between Baton Rouge and New Orleans … is overburdened with pollution-related cancer risk,” she said.
Little research specifically focused on Cancer Alley, however, has been done, so the link between risk estimates and cancer numbers in the affected communities has not been established, according to Terrell.
African-American communities in the corridor are disproportionately affected by fine-particulate-matter pollution, she said. And the majority of the parishes with the highest per-capita COVID-19 fatalities rate are found in the Cancer Alley region, according to Terrell.
New industrial developments proposed in the corridor have been subject to litigation filed by community and environmental groups in recent years.