A group of Colorado researchers concluded that living close to areas of oil and gas activity puts kids at greater risk for developing leukemia.
The study was published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention. Lisa McKenzie, the study’s lead author and an associate professor at the Colorado School of Public Health, spoke to the Texas Standard about her research.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: I know there have long been concerns about health risks associated with living near oil and gas activity, but how much do we know, I guess, before this study about its link to certain cancers?
Lisa McKenzie: Before this study was done, there have been three other studies that I know of. Two of those were in Pennsylvania and one was in Colorado, and we conducted the one in Colorado.
In Colorado, that study was what we would call a pilot study, so we were using our cancer registry and we were comparing children that had leukemia to children with other types of cancers and we saw an increased risk for children with leukemia compared to children with other cancers of living near the oil and gas sites.
So for this study, I guess you were trying to look at all of Colorado, a bigger picture than your pilot, I understand, really examining how much activity was there and how close they were to children.
Yes, so in this current study we were able to look at the level of activity around the child’s home, a density of the wells around the child’s home, giving greater weight to those wells that are closer to the home. And then they get a larger weight if they have more activity going on at the well site – so more production.
They’d have a higher weight if they were in development as opposed to production because we know there’s a higher potential for emissions of air pollutants during development than production.
And you decided to focus on childhood leukemia and really this one type of leukemia in particular?
Yes, so this is acute lymphocytic leukemia. We call it ALL for short. And it’s the most common leukemia in children. And this leukemia is one of the most common cancers in children as well.
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So can you give us more details about your conclusions regarding a child’s proximity to these wells and the risk of developing this disease?
First of all, we saw that children that were living closer to the wells and in areas with lots of oil and gas development around them, lots of active oil and gas development, children with leukemia were more likely to be living in these kinds of areas.
And what we were able to do in this study was show it wasn’t just about the distance of one well from a child’s home. What we saw in our study is you needed to consider all the wells around the child. So how dense is that development in the level of activity on the wells? And this is important because we were seeing effects all the way out to 13 kilometers in areas with lots and lots of development.
I would kind of also add if we were also seeing for children that might’ve just had one isolated well within a kilometer or a couple kilometers of their home, we weren’t really seeing that increased risk.
Do you have a sense of a minimum safe distance between kids and oil and gas development?
That’s the tricky part here. I think it’s very difficult. It depends on how much development is going on around that child.
So if it were just going to be one well, the distance between that child and that one well might be shorter than if there are lots and lots of wells already there.
Well, what else do you want to know? This seems to be an issue you’ve studied before. Where do you think the questions remain?
Well, what we’d really like to know is, what is it with oil and gas development that might be increasing this risk? We haven’t specifically looked at any particular chemical, and we do know that benzene is emitted from oil and gas sites. It’s part of the petroleum resource. And benzene a chemical that is known to cause leukemia.
There might be other chemicals So that’s what we would really like to know more about. And also just doing this kind of study in some other areas with oil and gas development to see, we’ve seen it in Pennsylvania now and we’ve see it in Colorado. I don’t know if there are any studies coming up in Texas. Texas is another area where there’s quite a bit of oil and gas development and there’s also larger populations that are living with that oil and gas development.
