We are physicians and other medical professionals based in Utah and throughout the country, who provide direct patient care and/or teaching and research. We have signed this letter to warn Utah policymakers that unless enough water reaches Great Salt Lake to reverse its recent decline, a serious public health crisis will plague Utah’s future.  

Environmental scientists have recently concluded that the lake is on a path to ecological collapse within the next decade.  The primary cause is the unsustainable amount of water that is diverted away from the lake every year, depriving it of roughly two-thirds of the flows that would naturally maintain its normal level.  Already the lake has receded to the point where its surface area is one-third the size of its modern-day peak.  

This decline threatens the health of over 2 million people who live immediately downwind of the lake.  As the lake recedes, dust storms originating from the exposed lakebed are ultimately inhaled by Utahns throughout the Wasatch Front.  NASA has identified specific communities most at risk from these dust storms, but residents of the entire Wasatch Front are at risk.  Whereas these dust storms were rare a generation ago, now we have an average of fifteen a year. If the lake continues to shrink that number will only increase.  

Thousands of studies from around the world, including from Utah, have definitively concluded that air pollution, including lakebed dust, is a serious health hazard. The consequences include decreased life expectancy, heart and lung disease, increased risk of strokes, heart attacks, heart failure and abnormal heart rhythms, neurologic and endocrine diseases, impaired organ development in children, poor pregnancy outcomes including birth defects and still births, cancer, reproductive and genotoxicity, and numerous other diseases and disorders whose basis is chronic inflammation.    

These health hazards are compounded by the fact that Great Salt Lake’s dust contains numerous toxic heavy metals like mercury, arsenic, and lead, and toxic chemicals like pesticides.  Such pollutants have accumulated in the lakebed as a result of decades of mining, industrial, and agricultural activity.  Dust from the Great Basin also likely includes radioactive isotopes left over from the country's nuclear weapons program, i.e., uranium, plutonium, strontium, and cesium.  Microorganisms and cyanotoxins capable of transmitting numerous diseases may also be carried in the dust.  

Utah has a painful history of its residents being "downwinder" victims from decades of Nevada nuclear tests. The degeneration of Great Salt Lake into a massive dust bowl would recreate a similar tragedy. As medical professionals, it is our obligation to speak out on behalf of public health protection and to alert local, state, and national policymakers of the predictable consequences of allowing the lake to disappear, or even to remain in its current diminished state. As we take an oath to do no harm, so should our lawmakers. We urge the State of Utah to implement whatever policies are necessary to avert this looming disaster.  Maintaining the lake’s surface area is essential to protecting the health of Utah residents.