Article by Tai Lung: “Can you estimate someone’s cancer risk from the air they breathe? Not exactly. Every person has different genetics, lifestyles, occupations, and environmental exposures that change over time. Air pollution varies from day to day, season to season, and even block to block. But scientists can make remarkably reliable estimates of a neighborhood’s cancer risk based on the type and amount of toxic air pollution.
After a year-long delay, this April, EPA released the latest air toxics data, which only included raw air data downloads. This year, for the first time in nearly 25 years, the air toxics data did not include cancer risk estimates.
Without a public explanation or opportunity for input, one of the nation’s most important environmental health datasets has quietly gone dark.
The disappearance of EPA’s cancer risk data continues a broader trend under this administration of environmental, public health, and other government datasets becoming less available, less complete, or more difficult to access.
What’s Changed?
For the 2021 data (this most recent release), only raw air emissions and concentration data are available for download. Previously, the EPA also produced detailed explanations and a mapping tool that made the data easier to discover, understand, and use. Additionally, they included cancer risk estimates to help translate data and complex scientific models into information the public could understand.
Now, if users want to understand cancer risk from air pollutants, they will need to download and analyze detailed air concentrations of nearly 200 toxic air pollutants for more than 8 million individual locations…(More)”.
