Report overdue on Pitt PA Health & Environment Studies
Report on Public Health Issues Related to Drilling, Fracking, Pipelining is Way Overdue
From the Request by Heaven Sensky, Center for Coalfield Justice, 5/4/23
It’s been almost four years since Governor Tom Wolf committed $3 million on a pair of studies to explore the potential health impacts of oil and gas development in our communities.
The Department of Health chose the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health to conduct the studies, and data collection concluded in September 2022.
Families who have been impacted by rare childhood cancers demanded these studies, taxpayers funded the studies, but the public has not heard directly from the Department of Health since the studies began.
Residents of the eight-county region included in the studies deserve a status update. (These counties border Brooke, Ohio, Marshall, Wetzel and Monongalia Counties in West Virginia.)
We believe this update is an important step for community inclusion in the research process and that it will strengthen relations with the public, making it easier for researchers to communicate and conduct outreach around the studies’ results. Every day that our trusted health institutions do not provide information, residents and health providers are left in the dark.
It is urgent that the Department issue an update as soon as possible. The timeliness of this status update is imperative, considering that more young people are being diagnosed with rare cancers in the studied communities, all the while the state continues to grant permits for pollution-emitting fossil fuel projects.
We’ve worked with partners to draft an open letter to the Department asking for an update.
Sign your name to be included in this open letter!
In November 2019, Governor Tom Wolf committed to spending $3 million on a pair of studies to explore the potential health impacts of oil and gas development after families impacted by rare childhood cancers demanded that the state investigate the cause of an apparent increase in rare childhood cancers in communities experiencing shale gas development. The Pennsylvania Department of Health chose the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health to undertake the studies, which became known as the PITT PA HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT STUDIES.
The data collection for these studies concluded in September 2022. The University of Pittsburgh’s public-facing website for the studies has not been updated since then. In early October 2022, the Pennsylvania Department of Health and the University of Pittsburgh publicly backed out of a public forum to discuss the progress and process of the studies. Unfortunately, the Department of Health has failed to provide any update on the status of the studies since it declined to participate in the forum. Meanwhile, residents had been led to believe that study results would be made available at the conclusion of the Wolf Administration, which never happened.
Thus, we implore you to provide an update on the status of the studies to the public as soon as possible. Community members have yet to hear directly from either the University of Pittsburgh or the Department of Health since the studies were announced. Given the importance of and the public interest in the results of these studies, the Department of Health must be transparent about their current status. Transparency is necessary to protect the credibility of the studies’ results and taxpayers’ investment.
The residents of the eight-county region included in the study deserve a status update regarding these taxpayer-funded studies designed to examine potential health impacts of human exposure to environmental risk factors, such as oil and gas development. We believe this update is an important step for community inclusion in the research process and that it will strengthen relations with the public, making it easier for researchers to communicate and conduct outreach around the studies’ results.
Every day that our trusted health institutions do not provide information, residents and health providers are left in the dark. It is urgent that the Department issue an update as soon as possible. The timeliness of this status update is imperative, considering that more young people are being diagnosed with rare cancers in the studied communities, all the while the state continues to grant permits for pollution-emitting fossil fuel projects.
Heaven Sensky, Organizing Director, CCJ
heaven@centerforcoalfieldjustice.org
724-229-3550
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Proximity to fracking sites associated with risk of childhood cancer
From the Yale University News, August 17, 2022
Pennsylvania children living near the sites at birth were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with leukemia between ages 2 and 7, a new study finds.
Pennsylvania children living near unconventional oil and gas (UOG) developments at birth were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with leukemia between the ages of 2 and 7 than those who did not live near this oil and gas activity, after accounting for other factors that could influence cancer risk, a novel study from the Yale School of Public Health finds.
The registry-based study, published Aug. 17 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, included nearly 2,500 Pennsylvania children, 405 of whom were diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common type of cancer in children.
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, also referred to as ALL, is a type of leukemia that arises from mutations to lymphoid immune cells. Although long-term survival rates are high, children who survive this disease may be at higher risk of other health problems, developmental challenges, and psychological issues. Unconventional oil and gas development, more commonly referred to as fracking (short for hydraulic fracturing), is a method for extracting gas and oil from shale rock. The process involves injecting water, sand, and chemicals into bedrock at high pressure, which allows gas and oil to flow into a well and then be collected for market.
For communities living nearby, UOG development can pose a number of potential threats. Chemical threats include, for example, air pollution from vehicle emissions and well and road construction, and water pollution from hydraulic fracturing or spills of wastewater. Hundreds of chemicals have been reportedly used in UOG injection water or detected in wastewater, some of which are known or suspected to be cancer causing. The paucity of data on the association between UOG and childhood cancer outcomes has fueled public concerns about possible cancer clusters in heavily drilled regions and calls for more research and government action.
“Unconventional oil and gas development can both use and release chemicals that have been linked to cancer, so the potential for children living near UOG to be exposed to these chemical carcinogens is a major public health concern,” said the study’s senior author, Nicole Deziel, associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.
“Studies of UOG exposure and cancer are extremely few in number. We set out to conduct a high-quality study to further investigate this potential relationship,” added Cassandra Clark, the study’s first author and a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Cancer Center. “Our results indicate that exposure to UOG may be an important risk factor for ALL, particularly for children exposed in utero.”
The study also found that drinking water could be an important pathway of exposure to oil and gas-related chemicals. The authors applied a new exposure metric in this study that they call “IDups” (which stands for “inverse distance to the nearest upgradient unconventional oil and gas well”). This means that the researchers identified UOG wells that fell within a child’s watershed area — the zone from which a drinking water well serving their home would likely draw water — and calculated the distance from the home to the nearest of those UOG wells. UOG wells falling within the watershed area are expected to be more likely to impact the home’s drinking water supply, they said.
“Previous health studies have found links between proximity to oil and gas drilling and various children’s health outcomes,” said Deziel. “This study is among the few to focus on drinking water specifically and the first to apply a novel metric designed to capture potential exposure through this pathway.”
This work adds to a growing body of literature on UOG exposure and children’s health used to inform policy, such as setback distances (the required minimum distance between a private residence or other sensitive location and a UOG well). Current setback distances are the subject of much debate in the United States, with some calling for setback distances to be lengthened to more than 305 meters (1,000 feet) and as far as 1,000 meters (3,281 feet). The allowable setback in Pennsylvania, where the study was conducted, is 500 feet, or 152 meters.
“Our findings of increased risk of ALL at distances of two kilometers or more from UOG operations, in conjunction with evidence from numerous other studies, suggest that existing setback distances, which may be as little as 150 feet, are insufficiently protective of children’s health,” Clark said. “We hope that studies like ours are taken into account in the ongoing policy discussion around UOG setback distances.”
Other authors from the Yale School of Public Health include Xiaomei Ma, Joshua L. Warren, Keli M. Sorrentino, Nicholaus P. Johnson, and Nina S. Kadan-Lottick (Kadan-Lottick is now at Georgetown University). Authors from the Yale School of Environment include James E. Saiers and Mario Soriano Jr. (Soriano is now at Princeton University).
SOURCE: https://news.yale.edu/2022/08/17/proximity-fracking-sites-associated-risk-childhood-cancer#