Burwell, S hhs

...

That could finally change with the newly appointed Department of Health and Human Service Secretary Sylvia Burwell, who was born and raised in Hinton, West Virginia.

“We implore you to come home for a visit, come to our mountaintop removal communities in the Coal River Valley,” nationally-honoredWest Virginia advocate Bo Webb wrote in a letter to Burwell this week. “Come to Twilight and Lindytown and see what mountaintop removal is doing to us.”

Recognizing the staggering human and health crisis from the extreme form of strip mining, including high birth defects and cancer rates, besieged residents and coal mining families in Burwell’s neighboring West Virginia communities have now issued an urgent appeal to the HHS chief to make a breakthrough visit to afflicted residents.

“All of us who have been born and grown up in West Virginia recognize our close connection to coal and the coal industry,” wrote Webb, a Vietnam veteran, who co-founded the Appalachian Community Health Emergency group. “My father, uncles, grandfather, and cousins, all worked in underground coal mines. Mining has been an honorable job in West Virginia.” He added:...