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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday August 30 2016, @01:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the drill-baby-drill dept.

Water contaminated with some of the chemicals found in drinking water and fracking wastewater has been shown to affect hormone levels in mice:

More than 15 million Americans live within a one-mile radius of unconventional oil and gas (UOG) operations. UOGs combine directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," to release natural gas from underground rock. Scientific studies, while ongoing, are still inconclusive on the potential long-term effects fracturing has on human development. Today, researchers at the University of Missouri released a study that is the first of its kind to link exposure to chemicals released during hydraulic fracturing to adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes in mice. Scientists believe that exposure to these chemicals also could pose a threat to human development.

"Researchers have previously found that endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) mimic or block hormones — the chemical messengers that regulate respiration, reproduction, metabolism, growth and other biological functions," said Susan C. Nagel, Nagel, an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and women's health in the School of Medicine. "Evidence from this study indicates that developmental exposure to fracking and drilling chemicals may pose a threat to fertility in animals and potentially people. Negative outcomes were observed even in mice exposed to the lowest dose of chemicals, which was lower than the concentrations found in groundwater at some locations with past oil and gas wastewater spills."

Researchers mixed 23 oil and gas chemicals in four different concentrations to reflect concentrations ranging from those found in drinking water and groundwater to concentrations found in industry wastewater. The mixtures were added to drinking water given to pregnant mice in the laboratory until they gave birth. The female offspring of the mice that drank the chemical mixtures were compared to female offspring of mice in a control group that were not exposed. Mice exposed to drilling chemicals had lower levels of key hormones related to reproductive health compared to the control group.

Adverse Reproductive and Developmental Health Outcomes Following Prenatal Exposure to a Hydraulic Fracturing Chemical Mixture in Female C57Bl/6 Mice (open, DOI: 10.1210/en.2016-1242) (DX)


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  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Francis on Tuesday August 30 2016, @06:42PM

    by Francis (5544) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @06:42PM (#395393)

    What about those folks with flammable drinking water? And what about those earthquakes that just happened to start at the same time that the fracking did?

    But, even if we grant the notion that the fracking itself isn't dangerous, what about all those gases that are being put into the atmosphere when we subsequently burn the gas? We should be shutting down oil and gas production, not increasing it. At some point we'll have emitted too much gas into the atmosphere that we'll have to take drastic action and chances are that we're already past that point. We're already seeing people being displaced by climate change, why further the problem so that a few obscenely rich companies can continue to profit at tax payer expense?

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