Health, the environment, and fracking

Posted 8/21/12

Too often, products or processes that can generate billions of dollars for an industry are allowed to go forward even when there are concerns that those products or processes may have negative …

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Health, the environment, and fracking

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Too often, products or processes that can generate billions of dollars for an industry are allowed to go forward even when there are concerns that those products or processes may have negative impacts on human health and the environment.

Howard Zucker, the acting NY State commissioner of health, who made the recommendation to ban fracking in the state, pointed out that there is a possibility that fracking would be like secondhand smoke: At one point it was believed to be harmless to people near the smoker; now smoking is banned in almost all public places because it is well known that secondhand smoke can cause premature death.

Congressman Chris Gibson, who was quoted by NY State of Politics (www.nystateofpolitics.com) as saying he did not regard the ban as a political decision, brought up the specter of Agent Orange, used to defoliate forests during the Vietnam war. “No one thought we were poisoning our own servicemen and women and the Vietnamese people… turns out we were,” Gibson said.

That’s not entirely true. There were experts in the 1960s who opposed the use of Agent Orange and who warned of long-lasting effects on humans who were exposed to it, and the long-term impacts on the environment. Then, their voices were ignored. But now that the evils of Agent Orange are well known, the victims of exposure are being compensated by the U.S. government, and so are some of their children, who have suffered birth defects because of their parents’ exposure.

These are just a couple of examples of products that were deemed to be safe enough to use, even as experts warned that they were not. Others include leaded paint, leaded gasoline, DDT, thalidomide, depleted uranium, asbestos—the list, unfortunately, grows longer with time.

On the other side of the question, there are many products in use now that are thought by some to be questionable in terms of human health. In some cases, however, such as that of genetically engineered crops, the companies that promote them are so powerful that, thus far, they have successfully blocked even labeling the products.

Currently, one of the largest groups of products that raise alarm in some quarters is pesticides. Some people are convinced that neonicotinoids are the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder that is decimating honey bee populations in the country and around the globe. The companies that manufacture them sell billions of dollars worth every year.

Thousands of synthetic chemical compounds have been created since the 1950s, and new ones come into existence every day. The Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDx) covers the impact of very low doses of such chemicals in the human endocrine system, which involves “development and function throughout all life stages.”

Theo Colborn, who founded the exchange and who passed away on December 14, 2014, explained the breadth of the problem in a 1995 paper. She wrote, “A veneer of long-lived, man-made chemicals now covers the earth from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Concentrations of these chemicals… are now at levels associated with population declines of marine, freshwater and terrestrial animals and with functional deficits in human offspring. It is impossible to predict the effect of the addition of a single new chemical to this veneer, let alone the addition of several hundred or more new chemicals a year that are introduced into commerce.”

In a 2006 paper, Colborn wrote, “Only relatively recently have we learned that a large number of chemicals can penetrate the womb and alter the construction and programming of a child before it is born. Through trans-generational exposure, endocrine disruptors cause adverse developmental and reproductive disorders at extremely low amounts in the womb, and often within the range of human exposure.”

The exchange also researched fracking and created a database of 650 chemicals used in the fracking process. A majority of them are suspected of causing adverse impacts on human health. Colborn noted that regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency do not study chronic, low-dose exposure to new chemicals.

Like it or not, we live in a world where we are constantly exposed to man-made chemicals that have generally not been tested for their impacts on human health in a meaningful way. Bringing a health professional into the discussion in New York State resulted in a ban on fracking. In the majority of other states where fracking is going forward, the state health departments were not brought into the discussion.

We believe not only that health-care professionals should be involved in the discussion about fracking, but they should also be more fully consulted by regulatory agencies about a wide range of other products and processes that are in use today.

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