Research Team Keeps Trying – and Failing – to Link Fracking to Reproductive Problems
Thursday August 25, 2016
Just when we thought the University of Missouri researchers couldn’t come up with an argument sillier than fracking causes low sperm counts, the same team is back with yet another study, this time claiming exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in fracking fluid causes problems with ovarian follicles in mice.
Of course, as EID has noted many times, one of the researchers of the study, Susan Nagel, actually appealed to anti-fracking activists Josh Fox, Mark Ruffalo and Yoko Ono to help her team fundraise for their research after their work was rejected by the National Institutes of Health for not being “good enough to be funded.” She also publicly endorsed Gasland in a talk entitled “What the Frack?” in which she called Josh Fox’s completely debunked films “educational” because they contain “a lot of good information.”
Against that backdrop of activism, the researchers exposed mice “to a mixture of 23 commonly used unconventional oil and gas chemicals at approximately 3, 30, 300, and 3000_g/kg_d, flutamide at 50 mg/kg_d, or a 0.2% ethanol control vehicle via their drinking water from gestational day 11through birth.”
Let’s just say if you give pregnant mice only contaminated water to drink – and at extremely high concentrations – is it any surprise that they might have abnormalities as a result? In other words, the researchers concocted the most unlikely scenario – continuous exposure to chemicals at high concentrations – and then tried to pass it off as plausible.
First, fracking fluid is typically 99.5 percent water and sand, while the remaining 0.5 percent is made up of additives. According to the View Full Article