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Comment by looofooo0 | Hacker News Reader

Any statistics on this claim?

Here in Norway there had been increasing focus on the long-term consequences of working on oil rigs.

There's been several studies[1] showing multiple different forms of cancer are over-represented among oil workers[2], and linked to benzene and crude oil exposure.

Granted Norway's oil is exclusively offshore, so exposure might be different.

But, contrary to what a former boss supposedly told his rig workers, just because oil is a natural product does imply it and its processing is harmless.

[1]: https://www.fhi.no/en/cancer/studies/cancer-among-offshorewo...

[2]: https://www.forskning.no/arbeidsvilkar-olje-og-gass/olje-pio...

'Cancer Alley' maps are generally just the same cherrypicked socioeconomic/ racial map you see everywhere- especially the refinery claims.

Adjust for those factors and the increased incidence disappears.

All these things people claim in the comments section seem like not very rigorous. Also, any increase in cancer cases has to be corrected for overweight people in the US.

> Adjust for those factors and the increased incidence disappears.

'Adjusting' for those factors builds in the assumption that they're independent of the thing you're trying to measure. If living near a smokestack is undesirable, then poorer/marginalized people will live there even if it also causes cancer.

Maybe they meant race/socioeonomics, not pollution.

I assume they meant if you look at roughly the same socioeconomic group that lives 500 miles from refineries as opposed to 500 meters you'll find similar numbers for cancer/other stuff. I'm not on either side of the fence because I don't know, just pointing out what was meant. I'd welcome statistics from either case.

The challenge is that it’s very unlikely that race/socioeconomic factors are causal in and of themselves, the reason why you would adjust for those variables is because they are tightly correlated with other causal factors that aren’t being observed directly, e.g. poorer healthcare availability, poorer access to healthy foods, etc.

Environmental pollution very reasonably can be hypothesized to be a causal mechanism behind cancer rates. Exposure to which is going to be heavily correlated with race and socioeconomics.

I may be misinterpreting OP, but their statement came off as “cancer maps are just maps of where poor non white people live, so it’s not the pollution”, but you can’t just “control” for things that way. Given the fact that environmental pollution is a hazard, there’s a reason why that demographic lives there that makes the exposure to pollution not independent from the demographic characteristics of the population.

Isn't causality transitive though? It sounds like you're saying that low socioeconomic status causes poorer access to healthcare and healthy foods, and that those cause worse health outcomes. Yet you're claiming that low socioeconomic status doesn't cause worse health outcomes. That seems wrong to me.

If causality were transitive the phrase “correlation doesn’t equal causation” wouldn’t exist

Surely that's incorrect. The most obvious scenario is A causes B, B correlates with A, but B does not cause A. Whether causality is transitive is irrelevant.

The quote is typically brought up when there isn’t a direct causal relationship between two variables, not when the causality is reversed. e.g. ice cream sales and drownings. In both cases heat drives behavior, but neither cause each other.

I’d say reverse causality is a very common example, particularly in health and medicine (e.g. illegal drug use and psychiatric disorders).

Not really. It's just a widespread area that rolls up to zipcodes, etc.

My mom was in public health research -- there's a ton of cancer clusters tied to industry and other factors which don't get recognized because of the methology for defining place and jurisdictional boundaries. In rural areas you have population issues because environmental impacts can be localized due to low population density.

One example at I can't find a free article online for was a 20-30 mile long county highway that was paved with oiled gravel in the 1960s and 70s. Incidence of lung cancer in non-smokers was higher than smokers in the general population, and with smokers significantly higher. Reason? A local industry donated waste oil from industrial processes to the county highway departments. They were laden with PCBs, dioxins and other goodies, delivered to your home in the form of road dust. Another was a plant that processed depleted uranium for munitions, that elevated kidney and bladder cancers in a narrow range across a few jurisdictions. The contractor settled claims there.

Around Houston, I'd expect what I experienced as a child downwind of the former Greenpoint garbage incinerator and Newtown creek refineries in NYC ... more childhood asthma, higher incidence of cancers of lung/mouth from long tenured residents, etc. Lots of nasty stuff is emitted in refining and chemical operations.

Houston has zillions of petrochem facilities around it that regularly blow up.

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