Pa. Health Report Destroys Conclusion of Activist Fracking and Asthma Study
Wednesday July 20, 2016
When researchers at Johns Hopkins University released a study on Monday suggesting that fracking causes asthma attacks, Energy In Depth noted that it was more than a little strange that the researchers didn’t include county-by-county comparisons between areas in Pennsylvania with and without shale development – which presumably would have been a slam dunk if their conclusions were sound, right?
Well, it turns out the researchers’ failure to do so might have something to do with the fact that Pennsylvania Department of Health data show that heavily-drilled counties within the study area have far lower age-adjusted rates of asthma hospitalizations than nine counties in the study area that have no shale gas production at all.
The following map from the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s 2015 Asthma Focus Report shows age adjusted inpatient hospitalization rates per 10,000 people due to asthma in Pennsylvania from 2009-2013.
EID added these impatient hospitalization rates from the data above to the top five shale counties in the study area, as well as nine notable counties with no production at all, to the map highlighting shale wells in Pennsylvania that was included in the study.
