Fracking linked to low birth weight in Pennsylvania babies

Study of birth records finds association between infant health and mom’s proximity to production sites

BY AIMEE CUNNINGHAM 5:55PM, DECEMBER 13, 2017

Living near a fracking site appears to be detrimental to infant health, a study eyeing the gas production practice in Pennsylvania suggests.

Babies of moms living within one kilometer of a hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, site in the state had a 25 percent greater chance of being born underweight than did babies whose moms lived at least three kilometers away, researchers report online December 13 in Science Advances. The chance of having a low-birth-weight baby was 1 in 14 for the moms living closest to a fracking site, but 1 in 17 for moms three to 15 kilometers away, says Janet Currie, an economist at Princeton University.

For babies born to moms living within one to three kilometers away from a site, the chance of being underweight at birth was about 8 percent greater than for babies of the more distant moms, Currie says. The study found no ill effect on infants born to moms residing farther away, an indication that fracking’s health impact may be highly local. In the study, distance of residences from the fracking sites was used as a stand-in for potential pollution exposure. But the researchers did not measure actual pollution exposure, or figure out whether people faced exposure through water, air or both.

Pam Factor-Litvak, an epidemiologist at Columbia University not involved in the study, notes that it’s possible the associations between fracking and poor infant health could be due to other factors besides pollution, such as extreme levels of maternal stress, perhaps due to noise and continuous traffic to and from the sites. ... “These results point to a concern of fracking,” Factor-Litvak says, but work remains to discover the mechanism behind the apparent connection to low birth weight. “There is a definite need to study the health effects of fracking accounting for the short-term changes in air quality, the possible long-term changes in water quality and the associations with stress.”

Low Birth-weight Babies Associated with Marcellus Shale Fracking

FrackCheckWV

Low Birth-weight Babies Associated with Marcellus Shale Fracking

Study finds lower birth weight babies near Penna. gas sites

From an Article by Ken Ward, Jr., Charleston Gazette, June 3, 2015

Hydraulic fracturing and infant health: New evidence from Pennsylvania

Janet Currie, Michael Greenstone and Katherine Meckel

Science Advances 13 Dec 2017:
Vol. 3, no. 12, e1603021
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1603021