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January 19, 2004
City Cancer
I'm in the car, in LA, listening to a discussion on how there is abnormally high rate of cancer from graduates of Beverly Hills High School. The interesting part is that they have been pumping oil from beneath the school since 85 (and once again earlier). ~50 students with Hodgkin's Disease, where the normal rate is 1 per 200,000. Very high rates of thyroid cancer as well. It took a coincidence for someone to realize there might be a connection. The city, at one point, was getting 25M per year in royalties from the drilling, which is actually ON and UNDERNEATH the campus. This is a good example of the detriment of living in a big city. Stuff like that is much less common in small cities. It is also an example of just how greedy our country has become. I guess in the 60s when they first started drilling there, they had to do a study on the environmental damage and found there was a possible risk to the students. This was ignored and eventually forgotten. Of course I'm sure the school and city didn't want to pursue it since they stood to benefit a great deal from it. Here is where it gets interesting though. While it was money that inspired these people to endanger the lives of students, it is equal levels of money that will fight it. Many wealthy people send their kids to Beverly Hills High and are now very unhappy. You don't want to make rich people unhappy. We'll see what happens next.Posted by wonko at January 19, 2004 11:12 AM
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