Medical experts are now speaking out about a common technique used by the oil and gas industry.
Advertisement
The study doesn’t prove fracking causes asthma or makes symptoms worse, and it also doesn’t explain why asthma flare-ups appear more likely when people live closer to fracking sites.
Living near fracking sites may lead to asthma exacerbations, according to a study published online July 18 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Asthma patients who lived in areas with the highest frequency of residential UNGD activity had a higher risk of contracting one of the three types of exacerbations compared with those patients in the lowest group of residential activity, the study’s results showed.
Fracking is a controversial process in which water, sand and chemicals are pumped deep into the ground at high pressure to extract hard-to-reach pockets of natural gas. Fracking took off in the state around the start of the study period; by the end, 6,253 wells had been drilled. The study included 35,508 patients identified in electronic health records.
“Going forward, everyone can learn from Pennsylvania’s experience”, said Brian S. Schwartz in a news release, the study’s co-author and a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins. While it is well known that air pollution exasperates asthma symptoms, researchers are still trying to figure out how fracking may affect the condition. They used electronic health records to identify nearly 36,000 asthma patients treated during that time in the Geisinger Health System, which covers more than 40 counties in Pennsylvania. The patients were grouped based on whether their asthma was categorized as mild (meaning the patient was prescribed medication for asthma), moderate (the patient visited the emergency room because of asthma) or severe (the patient was hospitalized because of asthma). The researchers looked at asthma exacerbations at four stages of natural gas production: preparing the site; drilling; stimulating the gas through fracking; and production.
Those outcomes were 50 percent to four times more common in asthma patients living closer to areas with more or bigger active wells than among those living far away.
Dr. Norman H. Edelman, senior scientific adviser for the American Lung Association, called the study “interesting and provocative”.
The findings held up even when the researchers accounted for other factors that can exacerbate asthma, such as living near main roads, having a family history of asthma, and smoking, they said.
While the study can not make a causal connection between asthma and fracking, it adds to an increasing body of evidence around its public health impacts. He went on to say, “We require direct cause-and-effect research to understand what’s happening”.
Advertisement
Be proactive – Use the “Flag as Inappropriate” link at the upper right corner of each comment to let us know of abusive posts.
