New evidence: fracking health impacts are worse than we thought

There are some important new studies about how fracking-enabled drilling harms health. Information is coming so fast it’s hard to keep up with it all.

Air pollution ‘can cause changes in the brain seen in autism and schizophrenia’

• Male brains are more strongly affected by pollution than female brains
• Pollution exposure could cause memory and learning problems in people
• It causes ‘rampant’ inflammation throughout the brain

That air pollution effects the brain is not new news. If you live in the gas patch, you might have a dirty mind.

Hormone-disrupting activity of fracking chemicals worse than initially found

Remember all those anecdotal stories about how fracking kills your thyroid and even your dog’s thyroid? From the same study: Human thyroid functions at risk in exposure to fracking fluids

“Among the chemicals that the fracking industry has reported using most often, all 24 that we have tested block the activity of one or more important hormone receptors,” said Christopher Kassotis, a PhD student at the University of Missouri, Columbia. “The high levels of hormone disruption by endocrine-disrupting chemicals that we measured, have been associated with many poor health outcomes, such as infertility, cancer and birth defects.

Federal safety investigators have determined that fumes from tanks at oil and gas wells are hazardous to human health but they don’t want us to panic and think those same fumes might harm people who live nearby.

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Don’t infer community risks from worker danger findings — researchers
Mike Soraghan, E&E reporter
Published: Tuesday, June 24, 2014

“Urban Drilling risks the fenceline folks too!” she wrote. That prompted the authors to warn that their research “should not be extrapolated to communities or other areas beyond the specific activities we are monitoring.”

At least four workers have died since 2010 from what NIOSH said appears to be “acute chemical exposures” near tanks at oil well sites in North Dakota and Montana.

Apparently it’s not just steam.