Colorado’s Top Medical Officer: No Evidence of “Public Health Impact as a Result of the Current Setbacks”
Tuesday September 27, 2016
Colorado’s top medical officer has even further discredited claims from anti-fracking activists about public health. As the Colorado Independent reports, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) executive director and chief medical officer Dr. Larry Wolk says there is no evidence that current setbacks would have a negative public health effect. As he put it:
“I think people often invoke public health or health concerns when we don’t necessarily have evidence that there is a valid health issue. There are certainly other issues that are valid as to why people don’t want these things near them: They don’t like the noise, they don’t like the smell, they don’t like the traffic, they don’t like the appearance. I’m not invalidating those, at all — I certainly wouldn’t like to live in a neighborhood near those, either — but I can’t, in my role, allow that to be a substitute for saying that this is bad for public health. We don’t have any demonstrative evidence that increasing the setbacks from oil and gas development would be any more protective of the public’s health than where the current setbacks are, because we don’t have any evidence that there is a public health impact as a result of the current setbacks.” (Emphasis added)
The new interview expands on a recent Greeley Tribune report quoting Dr. Wolk as saying that when it comes to oil and natural gas development impacting public health, “we don’t see anything to be concerned with.” Dr. Wolk again mentioned CDPHE data showing that areas where a majority of fracking is taking place are not registering higher levels of negative health conditions, and in some instances lower than those reported where little or no fracking occurs. As the Colorado Independent reports:
“What the data shows is that from a registry standpoint — we maintain registries based on a number of health conditions, whether it’s cancer, birth defects, etc.— that the rates of these different health concerns or issues in some of these oil and gas-rich communities were no different from those that were not i...