Simply stunning.
The USA Today series "Toxic Air and America’s Schools" (beginning 8 December 2008) is simply stunning in its scope and breadth.
The reporters and editors involved with this special report deserve substantial kudos for their effort. It’s an extraordinary example of how to combine scientific research and database analysis with investigative reporting to uncover an important public health problem, hitherto largely ignored.
Working with an US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) computer model, air monitoring equipment and scientists from the several universities, USA Today reporters Blake Morrison and Brad Heath pinpoint toxic hotpots near schools in 34 states.The air quality at these hotspots is worse than at one location in Ohio where it was so bad the students were relocated three years ago.
The reporters, who collaborated with scientists from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, ranked air quality at 127,800 public, private and parochial schools. They based their rankings on EPA's data of what chemicals were likely to be in the air outside. The analysis used emissions reports filed by 20,000 industrial facilities in 2005.
Then, they monitored air quality at 95 schools in 30 states. Scientists from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland assisted with sampling the air and analyzing it for toxic chemicals.
According to their analysis: "Among the chemicals found in the air near the seven schools: the metals manganese and chromium, and the carcinogens benzene and naphthalene, all in concentrations that could be well above U.S. Environmental Protection Agency safety thresholds for long-term exposure."
The print version of USA Today on the first day of the series devotes more than four full pages to the story, including a big piece of the front page. The paper’s daily feature that highlights news from each state is exclusively devoted to presenting results from each state. And they’ve published a searchable, companion website that contains all the data.
No doubt parents around the country are pointing their browsers here today, and that school districts will be facing some tough questions in the weeks to come.
Morrison and Heath deal very well with the issue of scientific uncertainty and the limitations of data in assigning cause to any specific case of cancer. That doesn’t stop them, however, from raising appropriate questions about the risks of exposures and patterns of disease in specific schools.
Morrison and Heath also expose an EPA asleep at the wheel. Although the model and the data they used were from the EPA, the EPA has never conducted an analysis like this. Indeed, they quote Ruch McCully, the EPA’s current head of the Office of Children’s Health Protection and Environmental Education. She says: “Do I personally have any idea of the chemicals that might be outside kids’ schools? Well, I’m not going to answer that. I’m not out there doing air monitoring.”
Coincidentally, this week the Philadelphia Inquirer is running an investigative series by John Shiffman and John Sullivan on massive failures in the Bush Administration’s EPA. It makes a good companion to this series.
