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Study: Living Near Fracking Correlates With Increased Hospital Visits
New submitter Michael Tiemann writes: An article published in PLOS One finds increased hospital admissions significantly correlate with living in the same zip code as active fracking sites. The data comes from three counties in Pennsylvania, whose zip codes mostly had no fracking sites in 2007 and transitioned to a majority of zip codes with at least one fracking site. While the statistical and medical data are compelling, and speak to a significant correlation, the graphical and informational figures flunk every Tufte test, which is unfortunate. Nevertheless, with open data and Creative Commons licensing, the paper could be rewritten to provide a more compelling explanation about the dangers of fracking to people who live within its vicinity, and perhaps motivate more stringent regulations to protect them from both immediate and long-term harm.
They are trying hard to pull a 'correlation is causation' scam
Except that in this case we have an intervention study, as some areas started fracking activity while other did not. Therefore looking at data versus time will tell us something.
And I also not we have explanations for causation. I see two obvious: chemical leaks, and nocebo effect.
That's controlled for by the randomness of the counties involved - both changes before and after drilling, and with no-drilling areas in the same region as controls (the control county had a drilling ban because it was in the Delaware River watershed). The admissions were largely not due to accidents - cardiology admissions were the strongest correlated. However, the authors don't identify the particular causative factors. They speculate, for example, that it might be diesel exhaust from all of the work vehicles that could be a causative agent. Another speculation is that the development of the industry has changed the demographics of drilling areas.
We really shouldn't be surprised that living next to industry in general isn't good for one's health, just from these sort of factors alone. Exhaust from heavy work vehicles, noise, dust, etc aren't famously conducive to good health. Even living next to a busy road is correlated with negative health effects.
A real problem with the study is, as they wrote, "Given that our modeling approach cannot account for within zip code demographic changes over the study period,". Curiously, while there were positive correlations between wells and health problems in most fields, there were negative correlations in gynecology and orthopedics. They remark "However, within the medical categories of gynecology and orthopedics, inpatient prevalence rates are expected to decrease each year by around 13–14% and 3–4%, respectively. Despite this surprising result, it is unclear why gynecology and orthopedics inpatient prevalence rates are decreasing each year. It is unlikely that these decreasing rates are related to the increased hydro-fracking activity." I'm surprised that they were allowed to get away with this - you shouldn't be allowed to credit increases to an industrial effect while just dismissing data (quite significant data) that doesn't match your hypothesis. There could be actually very useful information about the validity of their overall study and their conclusions in the reason for why gynecological inpatient cases are declining. For example, perhaps the demographics are changing to a lower percentage of women due to the arrival of the drilling industry. Men have shorter average lifespans and in particular a higher rate of cardiovascular disease.
To me, this is a really big hole in their study, and again I'm surprised it passed peer review with it there. But apart from that, I see no problem with the study, so long as people don't overinterpret the results. It's a very broad, generalized study focused entirely on correlation and not causation.
"You see, Government is a system that is based on weapons." -- Timster
Active fracking is an activity measured in days. Most of the life of a well is simply pumping...