CU Anschutz In The News

“Epidemiologists are a little bit challenged to try and sort out when we find these associations — is it because of these other pollutants or is it because of nitrogen dioxide?” said Jon Samet, an epidemiologist with the Colorado School of Public Health. But Samet argues that just because there are other sources of NO2 doesn’t mean gas stoves are a nonissue. These factors make it all the more challenging to isolate the gas stove’s role.

Lisa McKenzie, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus, has found that benzene concentrations in the air around oil and gas operations in Colorado are about twice as high as they are in Denver, whose air isn’t exactly pristine. “The closer you live to an oil and gas site, the higher your risk of cancer … and the higher your risk for respiratory and neurological effects,” she said.

Mike Van Dyke, an occupational health professor at the Colorado School of Public Health, told The Goods customers should be “respectful” by wearing masks and “maintaining distance as much as possible” while shopping. “It gets hard in terms of different places across the country,” he said. “Some places have required mask ordinances in place and some places don’t.”

Some doctors are even now arguing it would be cruel not to recommend a weight loss operation to teens with severe obesity, like Jewel. As Dr. Thomas Inge, a University of Colorado pediatrician who leads the most important ongoing study on adolescent bariatric surgery, sees it, what we now know about the effects of obesity is far more damning that what we know about the risks of surgery. And its potential benefits are great. Lives are “destroyed by severe obesity,” Inge said. “I’m much more worried about the consequences of not operating [on young people].”