Children's Health Defense By
Adding further evidence of the negative public health impacts associated with planet-heating fossil fuel pollution, new research published Wednesday found that children living in close proximity to fracking and other so-called “unconventional” drilling operations at birth face significantly higher chances of developing childhood leukemia than those not residing near such activity.
The peer-reviewed study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, examined the relationship between residential proximity to unconventional oil and gas development and risk of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common form of childhood leukemia.
Researchers compared 405 children ages 2 to 7 who were diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in Pennsylvania between 2009 and 2017 to a control group of 2,080 children without leukemia matched on birth year.
They measured the connection between in utero exposure to unconventional oil and gas activity and childhood leukemia diagnoses in two exposure windows: a “primary window” of three months pre-conception to one year prior to diagnosis and a “perinatal window” of pre-conception to birth.
Children with at least one fracking well within 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) of their birth residence during the primary window had 1.98 times the odds of developing acute lymphoblastic leukemia compared with those whose neighborhoods were free from such fossil fuel infrastructure, they found.
