Mohammed Ferdjallah*, Fuad Zeid and Asad Salem
The objective of this study is to investigate the impacts of coal production on the prevalence of lung cancer in West Virginia, USA. It has been accepted that lung cancer is strongly correlated with tobacco smoking. In this study, we used linear regression analysis to estimate the degree of association of lung cancer incidence and tobacco smoking prevalence in the presence of coal production. We found that lung cancer association with tobacco smoking becomes stronger when coal production is considered in the producing coal counties. In coal non-producing counties, the association between lung cancer and tobacco smoking is not significant due to high variability of lung cancer incidence and limited availability of data. When we used a first order inverse distance to estimate the effective coal production in coal non-producing counties, we found a moderate correlation between lung cancer and tobacco smoking. The study results demonstrated that effects of coal production potentiate the association between tobacco smoking on lung cancer development.
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