Faced with a drought of data concerning Appalachian drinking water quality and resulting health outcomes, researchers dug deeply to find what trickles they could.
Faced with a drought of data concerning Appalachian drinking water quality and resulting health outcomes, researchers dug deeply to find what trickles they could.
Alasdair Cohen, assistant professor of environmental epidemiology in public health, has studied drinking water and health challenges in rural areas internationally and in California. Since arriving at Virginia Tech in 2019, he has been studying similar issues in rural Appalachia.
“My first few years at Virginia Tech, I reached out to academics, nonprofits, and state and local government agencies to try and better understand what was known about water quality in the region,” said Cohen, who researches and teaches in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. “I was waiting for someone to say, ‘Oh, we have the data, here it is,’ as far as these are the contaminants of concern for a particular region. But increasingly it became apparent that data on water quality and related health outcomes in rural areas are limited.”
Read more at: Virginia Tech
Photo Credit: Terry Vlisidis via Unsplash
