More Fracking Nonsense: Frac’ing Shrinks Infants

This is not the first questionable “health” study in the Marcellus. A key feature to all these flawed studies: no actual data or measurements on pollution. Baseline data? They don’t account for other factors such as smoking (+alcohol & drug use), access to health care etc. Rather than being a proper epidemiological study they are examples of confirmation bias. Does the study indicate a clear link? No. What will the MSM report on? The title of the study.

A rebuttal to one of the previous papers (Casey, Savitz, Rasmussen et al) from Dr.Tony Cox.
http://journals.lww.com/epidem/Citation/2016/11000/Re___Unconventional_Natural_Gas_Development_and.21.aspx

Here’s a thought: More fracking locations means more local, higher paying jobs for more people, which means higher incomes, which means more money to buy cigarettes.

Anybody done a study on how higher-income, fracking communities might enable more pregnant women to smoke or more men to smoke around pregnant women, when smoking is seemingly a known cause for low birth weight?

This paper shows that the field of epidemiology has gone absolutely nowhere in the last several decades. Those who use bogus epidemiology in naked power grabs to support anti-industry campaigns, know no limit to their dishonesty.

This kind of study where populations are compared based on a single geographic criterion, are called ecological studies. Several decades ago, in the nuclear related field of radiation carcinogenesis, such ecological studies showed an interesting apparent trend. If you plot rates of death from cancer in the USA with regional levels of background radiation, epidemiologist Bernard Cohen found an unexpected correlation: the higher the natural radioactivity, the lower were cancer mortality rates.

Cohen argued that this proved the hypothesis of “radiation hormesis”, that low level radiation was beneficial to health. However the epidemiology scientific community rejected this conclusion based on the fundamental weaknesses of ecological studies. Basically, there are many confounding factors much more powerful than radiation in causing cancer and shortened lifespan. By far the largest of them is socioeconomic status. While radiation and environmental toxins might shave hours, days or weeks off your life, socioeconomic status adds or subtracts decades to life expectancy. So overwhelmingly dominant is socioeconomics over all other factors, that practically every supposed finding of a risk factor in an ecological study, is is fact simply revealing an asymmetry in economic standard of living. This Cohen’s study had basically shown that regions of the USA, such as in mountains or other areas of natural beauty, which for geological reasons had higher levels of background natural radioactivity, also tended to be inhabited by richer people.

(By the way I do consider that low level radiation is indeed either neutral or slightly beneficial to health based on numerous consistent animal studies showing that immune stimulus via heat shock proteins actually reduces cancer incidence and extends lifespan, repeatably on mice. At “best” – or worst – ionizing radiation is a very weak carcinogen dwarfed by other risk factors.)

A consequence of studies such as Cohen’s was that the epidemiology community essentially rejected the ecological study as a credible way and of assessing environmental risks to a population, due to insuperable statistical confounding, mainly by socioeconomic status. This was back in the 1980’s.

And yet here we are in 2017 and the anti-fracking activists are conducting an ecological study claiming to show proximity to a fracking site affects health statistics of newborns. Where is their controlling for economic status? Most likely they have just discovered that rich people prefer to live far away from fracking sites.

Some decades ago in the UK some studies claimed to show “clusters” of statistically excessive incidence of leukaemia in the vicinity of nuclear plant. Oddly this including those under construction but not yet actually running any nuclear reactions or generating any radioactivity. Looking further, it was found that any new large industrial project with a nee workforce moving to it from different parts of the country, tended to have a small excess of leukaemia cases. A hypothesis was advanced that leukaemia is a very rare outcome of common infections like colds or flu. When a new industrial project attracts workers from many distant areas to move to a location, there is always an increase in levels of infectious disease such as colds and flu since people are exposed to non-local strains of pathogen against which they have no immunity. Thus, more colds, more flu and slightly more leukaemias.

This effect was called the “migrant worker” effect; something like it might explain a small incidence of negative health outcomes where a new industry – fracking, or anything else – comes to a location.

All of this epidemiological knowledge has been ignored in this amateurish, naive and utterly flawed zombie-like ecological study, whose own wording makes it clear that its writers have interest only in an anti-industry political outcome, and could not be more ignorant and contemptuous of actual epidemiological science.

Remember – the overwhelmingly dominant factor determining life span and every health indicator, is economic. If a new industry brings economic uplift to a region, then any number of “risk factors de jour” invoked by Malthusian misanthropists opposition economic advancement, will not come within two orders of magnitude of approaching the benefit to human health, wellbeing and lifespan that are brought by proven technologies and industries such as fracking, nuclear power and all other life-giving industries that fill the Malthusians with intolerant nightmares of a growing and happy human population.

another instance of p-hacking. Search something wrong “near fracking areas ” (for whatever this means) in a database of thousand of things that could be wrong, and you’ll find a few dozen for sure in the statistical noise.