She also said there's evidence to suggest that the industry's methane emissions well exceed that 3 percent. She pointed to several studies suggesting that if fugitive emissions of methane from the equipment used to transport and store natural gas exceed more than 3 percent, natural gas use would have a greater climate change impact than coal. "As a fossil fuel, natural gas extraction and use is contributing to climate change, of course," Gorski said, "but before conducting this study, I didn't realize the amount of of evidence we have that it may be even worse than coal." They also found some surprising evidence of the industry's effect on climate change. They found evidence that water pollution, air pollution, and soil contamination caused by the industry have been linked to adverse health impacts through both exposure to toxic chemicals released during fracking, and through increased stress and anxiety caused by the increased light, noise, and truck traffic associated with fracking. The researchers also looked at studies on the industry's effects on drinking water, air pollution, land use, earthquakes, and climate change to assess how those impacts might also affect health.Ĭredit: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Global Public The researchers noted in the study that it's still too early to study some health impacts, like cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, because they take a long time to develop. In the studies we included, they're finding that they don't, which adds to the evidence that this is a concern for public health." "Basically, they're trying to see if their findings go away if they eliminate certain factors. "In these epidemiological studies, researchers do a lot to control for bias and consider all the confounding factors that could lead them to find false associations, and they adjust for them to minimize the impact on their findings," Gorski explained. Gorski and her colleagues also investigated the extent to which the studies they reviewed included metrics like the proximity of wells to residents, the phase of fracking the wells were in at the time of the study (active drilling versus ongoing production, for example), and the likelihood that non-fracking activities impacted their findings. "We were looking for repeat findings," Gorski said, "and there are six studies on birth outcomes, which each found associations between adverse outcomes and unconventional natural gas development." She added that, while they found a number of documented health impacts, the ones with the most evidence for concern are negative impacts on pregnancy and birth outcomes.Įvidence suggests women living closer to fracking have increased odds of having a baby with lower-than-average birth weight of having a high-risk pregnancy or having a baby with a low infant health index. "We have enough evidence at this point that these health impacts should be of serious concern to policymakers interested in protecting public health," Gorski said. "What we found pushes back against the narratives we often hear that say we don't know enough about the health impacts yet," Irena Gorski, co-author of the study and an environmental epidemiology doctoral candidate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told EHN. The researchers focused on the design of those studies to ensure that the ones they included in their study were scientifically valid, then summarized what's been learned about the industry in the last decade. The study, which was published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Global Public Health in February, looked at several hundred scientific articles about the community and health impacts of fracking. Fracking has been linked to preterm births, high-risk pregnancies, asthma, migraine headaches, fatigue, nasal and sinus symptoms, and skin disorders over the last 10 years, according to a new study.įracking, also known as hydraulic fracturing, is a process of extracting oil and gas from the Earth by drilling deep wells and injecting a mixture of liquids and chemicals at high pressure.
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