In April of 2024 the website Healthy Debate decided to look at the health harms associated with fracking. Fracking is a method that started being used in the early 2000s to release natural gas in rock formations underground in which a rig drills “vertically for several kilometers under fresh and saline water aquifers and then horizontally for several more kilometers. Because the gas is trapped in shale or “tight” rock formation, millions of liters of water mixed with chemicals and other substances are then forced down the well with enough pressure to produce micro-ruptures (hence the name “fracking”) of the rock to release the gas.”
Healthy Debate reviewed more than 50 studies and and what they found was quite alarming. Half of the studies that they reviewed focused on pregnant mothers and their babies and “the large majority reported harmful effects of living near these sites, including impaired fetal growth, premature birth and congenital malformations. Other studies found that living close to fracking sites may lead to higher risk of asthma flares, heart disease, childhood cancers and overall mortality.” The studies they reviewed were not limited to a single geographic location but instead were from various locations across the United States and Canada. “[T]he findings of harmful outcomes were not restricted to one location, a characteristic referred to as “consistency” in the scientific literature” and several studies showed a clear ‘dose-response’ relationship meaning that “increasing exposure levels was associated with increasing risk of preterm birth, congenital birth defects and childhood leukemia.”
In response to the Healthy Debate review the New Brunswick chapter of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment began “sounding the alarm on the health risks associated with shale gas production using the extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” and calling for a permanent ban on the practice.” This is in direct opposition to the province’s Premier Blaine Higgs who is “promoting shale gas development as a better climate plan than carbon pricing and suggesting the current moratorium on fracking could be overturned.”
No matter where in the world you live, if you are sharing the environment with ongoing fracking operations it is bad for you and bad for the planet. Make sure that local politicians, physicians and ordinary citizens are aware of this research which can be used to argue for ending fracking everywhere.