Other: I’ve noticed the incident of local people in town getting vitiligo seems to be going up. The occurrence in the general population is believed 22/100,000. I can count 8 people who have the condition and I know that I don’t know nearly half the population of Bloomington. So anecdotally that leads me to believe that it is possible that the occurrence in town is much higher than the general population. This of course piqued my curiosity. So I did some research as to the cause of vitiligo. Although there are many potential causes, one cause that stuck out to me is environmental exposure to phenol-containing chemicals. So I looked up what phenol chemicals are and used for. Although they are used for many industrial products, I learned that they are most often used to clean medical devices. https://www.chemicalsafetyfacts.org/chemicals/phenol/ This made me think about the cleaning facility that Cook medical has in Ellettsville. And made me wonder if there is a company in town that uses this type of cleaning agent (Cook or some other) that may be spreading into our environment and causing exposure risk to the general population. So my question is: has the health department recieved data about the prevalence of vitiligo in our community and if so is it elevated in comparison to national averages? And if so, will there be an action plan to reduce the exposure risks to our community?

Assigned to

Cheyenne Bowlen