Story at a glance
- A new report from Human Rights Watch highlights the health harms besides cancer impacting residents of ‘Cancer Alley.’
- ‘Cancer Alley’ refers to an 85-mile stretch of land along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that is home to roughly 200 petrochemical plants and refineries.
- People living in those parts of Louisiana have complained about the harmful toxins for decades.
Pregnant women living in parts of Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ are far more likely to give birth prematurely and to babies that have low birth weight compared to women living outside the state, according to research in a Human Rights Watch report published Thursday.
The research, which is part of a study currently under peer review, argues people living in Louisiana’s most air-polluted areas have premature birth rates as high as 25.3 percent, almost twice the state average of 13.5 percent.
That number is also about two and a half times the U.S. average of 10.4 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Those air-polluted areas include much of the 85-mile stretch of land along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that is home to 200 petrochemical plants and refineries.
After a cluster of cancer cases started to pop up in the 1980s, the area earned the nickname ‘Cancer Alley.’
On top of this, the research found that babies born in parts of Louisiana with the worst air pollution had rates of low birth weight as high as 27 percent.
That rate is more than double the state average of 11.3 percent and more than three times as much as the national average of 8.5 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Our study reveals that pollution brings more than cancer to Louisiana — it puts babies at risk for low birth weight and pre-term births,” Kimberly Terrell, one of the authors of the study, told The Hill.
“Louisiana residents identified industrial pollution as the cause of reproductive problems in the 1980s. Science is finally catching up.”
Premature birth and low birth weight are the second leading causes of death among infants in the United States, according to the CDC.
But the conditions can also cause health problems later in life.
Some research suggests that low birth weight infants are more likely to develop insulin resistance and have a greater risk of developing diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.
Antonia Juhasz, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch and lead author of the report, interviewed 37 residents of ‘Cancer Alley’ for the report, several of whom had children either pre-term or with low birth weight.
Ashley Gaignard, 46, a ‘Cancer Alley’ resident from Donaldsonville, La., told Human Rights Watch all three of her children were born at a low birth weight.
Her son Jason was born pre-term and at a low birth weight, resulting in an underdeveloped lung, according to the report.
Because of these conditions, Jason has struggled with severe asthma his entire life.
“By the second grade at Donaldsonville Elementary, he was restricted from recess because of his frequent severe asthma attacks which required that he be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance,” the report states. “Trips to the hospital persisted through the sixth grade. He still must manage his asthma with nebulizer treatments and a pump.”
This story was updated at 7:40 p.m.
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