What do asthma, contaminated drinking water and climate change have in common? They’re all symptoms of the same root problem: pollution harming both our planet and our people.
Results from a Pew Research Center Poll released in September showed 65% of registered voters said healthcare was “very important” when considering their vote in the 2024 presidential election. The same poll showed only 37% of voters felt the same about climate change and the environment.
The evidence connecting harmful fossil fuels and negative health outcomes is solid, so why is there a disconnect? For many people, health care concerns like chronic illnesses that make daily life harder simply seem like more immediate issues. Despite knowing climate change has worsened the intensity and frequency of severe weather events, climate change is still seen by many as a future problem and therefore less urgent to consider day-to-day.
That’s where Clean Wisconsin’s Environmental Health Initiative comes in. There’s a plethora of datasets that give us an idea of how and where pollutants are negatively impacting human health. Each of those datasets collects information about air pollution from power plants, traffic emissions, water contamination, walkability and many other factors that contribute to health outcomes like asthma, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, lung cancer and more.
At the core of our Environmental Health Initiative is an effort to both understand the scale of health impacts from pollution around the state and to tie that information to real medical data from the communities that are most impacted. Making that connection will help policymakers better understand these issues and champion strong environmental health policies.
As is the case with other data-heavy topics, it’s difficult to find the larger story behind the numbers. Science Program Director Paul Mathewson says the key to making the connection between health and the environment is to identify concrete connections between a specific type of pollution and health trends in a community.
“Until then you can always poke holes saying, ‘we don’t know those impacts — there’s uncertainty here.’ But if you can actually show it in the medical data, the health data, that’s where we want to go to make the strongest case possible for fixing this problem,” Mathewson says.
While finding trends in existing data can help with clarifying the connection between health and the environment, many of the indices don’t tell the whole story.
Take drinking water quality, for example: It’s not considered in most indices, but we know that contaminants like nitrates and PFAS — both of which have been found in groundwater wells around the state — have real and potentially serious health outcomes ranging from thyroid disease and hormone suppression to increased risk for some cancers. Their impact on Wisconsinites’ health needs to be considered, too.
“Each data set has its own limitation, but the collective story they depict is what we want to tell,” Mathewson says.
Behind every data point is a kid suffering from asthma that’s made worse by the gas plant burning methane down the street; a family in central Wisconsin who has to think twice about drinking their groundwater because of nitrate contamination; an angler who can no longer eat the fish they catch because of PFAS contamination and the health risks it brings.
Their lives have been made more difficult because of the pollution where they live. But it’s not too late to change course.
“We’re really just trying to tell Wisconsinites’ stories and help them improve their health and really try to achieve this goal of health equity we’ve been talking about for so long,” Population Health Service Fellow Kayla Rinderknecht says.
Be sure to read Mathewson’s Under the Lens: Launching the Environmental Health Initiative story featured in the Fall 2024 issue of The Defender to learn more about the first set of findings from the Environmental Health Initiative.
