Your Cancer Risk Depends in Part on Where You Live.
For every 100,000 Americans, 451 people will develop cancer in a given year. But that depends on where you live: some counties have a higher incidence of cancer than others. And those metrics fit very well with this environmental quality map , which you should check now because it might be the last of its kind.
A study comparing this map to cancer rates, published today in the journal Cancer , found a difference of 39 cancers (per 100,000 people) between areas with the highest and lowest environmental quality. This measure includes air, water and land pollution, as well as other aspects of your “environment” – the world around you – such as crime, road safety, and access to healthy food.
Environmental data were collected between 2000 and 2005, and cancer data for the years immediately thereafter, from 2006 to 2010. Of course, there are a lot of caveats here: if you got cancer at the end of your life due to pollutants breathed in as a child, this link will not necessarily show up in this dataset (especially if you have moved since then). But on average, the quality of the environment matches the incidence of cancer.
The study also doesn’t tell us if moving to a higher-ranked area will improve your health, or how much better it can be. Some of the “environment” they measured includes things like poverty and race, which vary from place to place, but which you cannot change by moving. In addition, with such a broad overview, the study may miss details such as breast cancer rates appear to be higher in places where more people have money or insurance for regular mammograms.
However, this information is “essential to cancer control and the health of the general population,” cancer researcher Scarlett Lin Gomez writes in comments published alongside the study. And that’s at risk: much of the pollution data comes from the Environmental Protection Agency, which the Trump administration is eliminating .
Gomez points to several other policy actions that threaten the ability to collect public health data in the future. HR 482 , for example, will ban federal databases showing racial differences. So enjoy this data while you still can.