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 Investigators have begun trying to tease out the long-term effects
of this natural gas extraction technology, but answers on whether
people who live near fracking sites are at increased risk of disease
are likely several more years away, given the complexity of this
research - and the fact that many people who have allowed companies
to lease their land for fracking have signed confidentiality
agreements, says the lead author.
“For the most part, they’re not allowed to talk about any ill
effects to themselves, to their water, to their land, even to their
animals,” Dr. Madelon Finkel, an epidemiologist at Weill Cornell
Medical College in New York City, told Reuters Health in an
interview. “That in a sense is hampering the ability to do good
research.”
Finkel and her colleague Jake Hays of PSE Healthy Energy in New York
City co-authored a call for high quality epidemiological research on
the environmental and health impacts of fracking in the Journal of
Epidemiology and Community Health.
“The available science raises substantial questions about the
potential for harm to health,” they write. And people living near
drilling sites “are presenting with symptoms (e.g., skin rashes,
nausea, abdominal pain, respiratory difficulties, headaches,
dizziness, eye irritations, throat irritations, nosebleeds, anxiety,
stress) that demand further investigation.”
High-volume hydraulic fracturing involves pumping millions of
gallons of water, chemicals and sand or silica at high pressure into
holes drilled into rock formations. This causes small fractures in
the rock that allow natural gas or oil to escape. The fluid that
flows back after fracking contains “thousands of gallons of toxic
chemicals, the vast majority of which are not identified,” Finkel
and Hays write in their commentary.
“Wells have blowouts, spills are common, and methane is leaked and
vented into the atmosphere at all stages of the extraction process,”
they add.
Finkel is combing through Pennsylvania Department of Health data
from the heavily fracked southwest portion of the state to
investigate whether there is any association between fracking and
cancers that are known to be linked to environmental contamination,
such as bladder cancer, thyroid cancer and leukemia.
She has identified higher-than-expected rates of cancer in
Washington County post-fracking, but she also learned that cancer
rates had been high before fracking was introduced to the region.
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“As I dug deeper, I realized that in a lot of these communities and
counties there was a lot of coal mining going on in that area, and
there were a lot of chemical industries that were in operation
there,” she said. For example, uranium tailings had been dumped in
one site - and a golf course built on top of the dump.
In addition to sorting out these environmental factors,
investigators must look at lifestyle factors such as smoking,
alcohol use and diet among people living in the area, Finkel added.
She hopes to perform a case-control study to hone in on the
potential health effects of fracking. This involves matching people
with an illness to similar individuals who are free from the
illness, and figuring out whether the two groups have different
“exposures.” For example, Finkel said, it’s possible to measure the
distance between a person’s home and the closest fracking fluid
well, to see if people who live closer to these wells are at greater
risk of disease.
“Until we do that, what we have is ‘he says, she says,’” Finkel
said. “We just have to be careful not to airbrush things and say,
‘well, you’re sick because of the fracking.’”
For now, she added, “safeguards should be put in place to minimize
the potential for harm.” This would involve, for example, storing,
treating and disposing of fracking fluid carefully to avoid
contaminating drinking water supplies, and taking steps to capture
methane.
“I’m not anti-fracking per se,” Finkel said. “I’m just saying, do it
cleanly and appropriately and correctly.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1fXvend Journal of Epidemiology and Community
Health, online August 7, 2015.
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