UCLA’s Michael Jerrett quoted in NBC News story highlighting systemic racism in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley”
June 21, 2020Michael Jerrett (professor of environmental health science at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health) is quoted in an NBC News story highlighting the structural environmental iniquities that residents of the banks of Mississippi River continue to face. Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” is the densest concentration of petrochemicals plants in the country, and Black communities in this region have suffered from health problems associated with pollution.
Jerrett explained how chronic air pollution affects the body. “The more we study air pollution, the more we see that there is a very pervasive risk that affects most of the body’s major organ system and metabolic functions,” Jerrett said.
Read the full story in NBC News.