to be here I’m very pleased to be here a
big part of the debate about fracking is
certainly related to public health
so that means groups of people but in
fact we need to consider what happens to
individuals whether they’re in the
workplace fracking or whether they’re in
the community and then we know that in
Scotland in Wales in Northern Ireland
and in Ireland fracking at the moment
shouldn’t be going ahead there are
various forms of bans there but it’s
still happening in England and it’s
still happening elsewhere so what I want
to do is have a look at how the position
has arisen whereby fracking has been
accepted in some places and not others
and to what extent it presents a
significant individual national and
possibly a global threat to public
health to do that I want to link it to
not just debates about the science and
the technology but also the policy if
you hear some industry views at one
level they say well we’ve got the
technology under control we know what
we’re doing we understand what sort of
exposures can occur we understand the
routes that people may be exposed by we
understand the effects and they also say
well it’s very well regulated and our
practice as an industry is very good so
don’t worry at one level that’s a simple
solution at another level they will say
well of course technology always goes
wrong there will be failures of
machinery
there will be exposures but the key
thing is they’re not going to be
significant ones and they’re not going
to threaten either the workers health in
the industry or communities that’s
that’s the argument so what you’ve got
in front of you there is something that
Seaport Scotch Environment Protection
Agency produced which gives you and I
about shale gas generally and also coal
bed methane I mainly talk about fracking
so we’re talking about fracking shale
rock with high-pressure water injecting
also sand and various fluids and other
agents and then using proppants to make
sure that you can get the hydrocarbons
out so that’s how the process works and
I think CP are quite nice about this
here so they’re saying this is where
pollution can occur and if you see there
could be things going up in the air so
it could be air pollution there could be
soil pollution about which very little
is known even in the US and there could
be water pollution as you you drill down
and the argument goes we drill down
where those liquid goes out things come
up and everything’s under control
and here you don’t see the whole
lifecycle analysis of fracking you see
lorries going outside at the fracking
zone you don’t see things coming in and
if we want to assess the public health
impacts of fracking we need to look at
all the materials all of the machinery
and so on that comes in and then we need
to track it through to its disposal
significantly we can see economic
assessments their economic life cycle
analyses of fracking but we don’t have
public health ones but what is also
significant is that the Scottish
government carried out a big exercise
that people are very familiar with and
decided we didn’t know enough about the
health effects to allow fracking to go
ahead but they also brought in economic
arguments and other arguments and I
think in that sense a lot of countries
might benefit from using the public
health strategy okay so the assumption
has been that risk assessment and risk
management of shale gas has been fine
and one of the arguments from certain
literary peers down in Westminster has
been well we use coal where we developed
steel in the past we’ve used wood no
problem there with those sorts of energy
sources of course nobody knew about what
the effects might be of those particular
developments and it may well have been
that even if we did no indeed if we had
no we probably have gone ahead but we
know far more now about what the impacts
of some of the substances and some of
the processes will be and indeed there
was evidence at the time about big
problems with some of these materials
and the argument goes well we must have
shale gas for energy well of course
there’s a lot of evidence showing that
in fact why we’re getting a lot of shale
gas is to develop plastics and that
presents another set of of public health
assessments that I won’t go into now
this picture you might think is the
finned whole community going down to
Inverness for a Friday night out but it
isn’t it’s actually shale oil miners
shale oil miners in West colder in 1935
and the argument there was well it’s not
particularly hazardous industry the
reason they’re wearing capes by the way
is because of water down in the mine not
necessarily because of any exposures in
fact there were lots of exposures but
the biggest problem came for the process
workers of shale oil the paraffin
workers who were exposed to very high
levels of a range of chemicals that
cause very serious cancers and if you’re
asked about well you know we get on top
of the problems very quickly in the
1870s they were diagnosing these
diseases and it was 50 years on and they
were still diagnosing these diseases so
you could say well we’re much much
better now we’re much more sophisticated
in what we do and you won’t get these
sorts of problems but in fact there are
a lot of vicious circles operating there
one is you don’t look you don’t find so
there’s not a problem and quite often
people don’t want you to look because if
you find a problem it’s re going to be
expensive or it’ll delay the technology
and there’ll be all sorts of issues
that’s that’s one sort of vicious circle
and I think it still applies in some
areas as I’ll explain in a few
it’s the other one is you don’t have the
capacity to look you don’t have the the
monitoring equipment and so on you can’t
work out what the effects of shale gas
would be both in a community and Beyond
and then there are various versions of
that as well
that as you go along what you do have
the technology you can monitor but you
can’t make sense of it or you monitor it
and you don’t release the results
because this may be problematic
so these vicious circles certainly have
been running around for quite a while
and they’re basically linked in with
this old adage about absence of evidence
isn’t evidence of absence that it allows
if you don’t look for people to say well
there isn’t a problem and that’s
basically because you’ve not found it
because you’ve not looked and you
haven’t found it it doesn’t mean that
there isn’t a problem so an illustration
of this just working its way through
thinking about fracking benzine may
occur naturally in terms of the geology
and so on and it may also be part of the
fracking process so the industry said
well this is a well-established
substance you don’t have to worry
they’ll be no exposures but in fact in
the 1980s and indeed in the 1970s they
were saying you actually should have
tight standards of these and the
standard they were suggesting in was ten
parts per million sorry and the
government regulators in the UK said
well you know we’re quite happy with
running with some of these standards now
we’re down to nought point one part per
million and it’s viewed as highly
problematic for a range of reasons and
if you look beyond the workplace that’s
the wordplay standard now we see that
risk assessments have identified a
difficulty about working back so high
doses means big problems low doses don’t
that has collapsed in toxicology so
there are real issues about very low
dose dose exposures and there may be
particularly vulnerable groups so they
found that in fact benzene goes across
the
human placenta and through milk so it
could be a problem in fact to to an
infant and they’re even issues in fact
about cross generational effects of
benzene so we started off being very
confident you know we can control it and
now all of a sudden we’re saying that
very low levels could be highly
problematic both for communities and for
workers so this is where I think you
should think of new approaches and new
tools a lot is made about the energy mix
you know you’ve got to have the right
range of things but in fact we should be
looking at what chemical mixtures there
are and to what extent they may affect
people and there’s two things that
really we ought to be building in now to
our risk assessments one is the exposome
and the exposome is estimating the total
exposures that might occur prenatal and
postnatal and there could be critical
points where the effects will be very
serious so they could be very short for
instance in in in the pregnancy cycle
and they could be very short in terms of
children but as you grow older you may
still be getting lots and lots of
exposures so bear in mind the exposome
and also bear in mind the point about
cumulative health impact assessments
which means that in fact you should
consider the chemicals in the industry
you should consider deprivation because
you should consider a whole range of
things which is complicated and
challenging but if we don’t make those
assessments we’re not really going to be
able to work out what the impacts of
various processes might be of course the
argument about shale gas is that we
already know a fair amount about it
although relatively recently so this is
a picture of the literature that’s grown
on the subject and in science you’re
always looking at direction of travel
and the direction of travel has
generally been that the fracking process
and the exposures of populations and
different communities is presenting real
risk we
there are hazards we know there are
risks and importantly we main we may be
aware that there are unknown hazards
there so data gaps can be as important
in public health as the data knowledge
few quick examples of how this operates
there’s a great deal of attention being
paid to water and people have said well
if we look at the u.s. there isn’t water
pollution and there aren’t problems but
in fact if you look at what American
researchers are saying they’re saying
that it’s very difficult in some
instances to identify data on fracking
processes so how do you assess the risk
it’s a leap in the dark
and what’s intriguing about the u.s.
Environment Protection Agency picture
there is they’re actually showing things
going into the workplace as well as
things going out that needs to be part
of the total assessment you know
exposure to disease or exposure to these
diesel transport problems and so on and
what’s often missing from these pictures
is not just the chemical insults but
also issues about mental health and
well-being and what’s very well
documented now is communities threatened
with fracking not necessarily where
fracking has occurred have experienced
significant public health problems
because of anxiety and so on and that
should be factored in that’s part of the
consideration we told that regulation
and inspection and industry practice
will be good well we’ve just seen a
recent report coming out of the European
Union which was looking at regulatory
practices and they found that there were
real worries about whether we had the
capacity to treat wastewater where
whether the various sites were
appropriate and whether or not the
variety of European governments would
actually exercise appropriate control of
the process I won’t get into brexit but
there’s clearly one school of thought
the same let let everything rip and
let’s deregulate and another school of
thought
also with brexit is Hussein we must
maintain regulatory standards but
there’s a worry there
and of course you have to think
nationally you have to think globally
we’ve also seen some other reports that
have looked at problems with possible
contamination from other activities
again I won’t go into detail there but
it’s saying it’s a significant
difficulty and in the US where they’re
meant to have everything cracked they’ve
done all the research they still can’t
answer these problems nor do I want to
go into detail on the literature but
there is a lot of literature there what
we know are that there are significant
neurological associations with fracking
we also know that in fact there are
problems linked to reproduction from a
number of studies we also know that
general health with regard to coal bed
methane has been affected in terms of
Australian studies there are roots that
have looked at skin contamination for
workers there are roots that have looked
at benzene exposure for communities with
significantly high levels in areas where
fracking goes on and there are also
reports now about neurodevelopmental
problems based on a review of the
literature about the chemicals that are
used in in the industry and bear in mind
we are talking in some instances with
endocrine disruptors that could be used
in fracking not of parts per million not
of parts per billion but parts per
trillion so this argument that overdoses
the exposures are very low is irrelevant
what doses effective very low doses
could affect you here’s a study on
childhood leukemia where they looked at
over a hundred hundred and forty
chemicals and looked at whether there
were links or not with with leukemia
from air exposure and water exposure and
lo and behold they found there was a
lack of data on a whole set of these
chemicals so we don’t know what the
effect could be but there was a lot of
data indicating significant problems so
we should be very aware of that I
mentioned at the beginning the global
issue and
national issue so even if fracking
doesn’t go on in Scotland if it’s going
on elsewhere what are the implications
well we know it may not be the worst
contributor but it’s certainly a
significant contributor to problems in
terms of of climate change and that will
mean not only more zoonotic diseases
it will mean not only rises in in sea
levels but it will also have these other
impacts on public health so if there are
problems in terms of access to water
access to food in fact it may be a
factor in contributing to significant
global conflicts and we shouldn’t forget
that so we need to join the dots up we
can’t deal with things separately you
know we are in the Anthropocene age
where that we need to check what’s going
on so is it a picture of gloom and
despondency well I don’t think it is
certainly not in the Scottish setting
where there were concerns about
environmental justice there have been
concerns about whether or not there’s a
social licence to Frank and I think the
argument now is for a lot of people well
we have sufficient evidence from the
science we have sufficient questions
about the problems with the industry
performing as it should
problems with planning creep and
breaches of planning problems with
regulators been able to check on what’s
going on
to lead us to a very different approach
and I don’t think there’s anything new
to say if you look at what the World
Health Organization was talking about 25
years ago that’s still highly relevant
if we could bring some of those
principles back in and if people were
aware that they should expect certain
things in terms of information about
what goes on and in terms of risks and
openness about the gaps with regard to
risk assessments things would be better
so here you’ll see every individual in
that charter is entitled to information
and
consultation on the state of the
environment and involvement in plans and
decisions well what we’ve seen in
England is local communities being
consulted and then basically they’ve
been totally ignored what we’ve seen in
the u.s. is the same thing and the
mechanisms that exist for consulting
communities about public health and
other problems have been very poor in
health impact assessments done in
Scotland often they’ve just spoken to a
couple of focus groups and said well
this is telling us you know how
communities feel how they understand the
hazards the the other principles there
relate to public policy and again it’s
almost saying how do we prioritize what
we do in the world and the health of the
individual in the w-h-o charter it needs
to be paramount as far as their concern
and particularly vulnerable groups so
that means pregnant women you know it
means they’re very young and I’m playing
increasing attention to this one myself
it means the older person and people who
are ill there are a whole set of people
who may be adversely affected when
possibly or other parts of the
population won’t be so that needs to be
built in more strongly particularly if
we’re talking about extremely low level
exposures the next point that the
Charter made was new technologies should
be introduced with prudence this is the
precautionary principle coming in and
appropriate Trier assessment and in
Scotland in in Northern Ireland to some
extent in Wales in New York in France in
parts of Germany they’ve decided that it
is prudent not to go ahead with the
technology on the basis of the evidence
that we’ve got the health of the
individual and communities should take
precedence clear precedence over economy
and trade considerations well I’m a
pragmatist I’d settle for it Beach the
health of individuals being treated
equally with trade and the economy but
it isn’t again out with Scotland I think
those sorts of priorities are pushed
right down
and there are other drivers and of
course bear in mind that what happens
with the developments of fracking is
that the cost the adverse costs don’t
disappear they put on communities we pay
for the cost of people becoming ill
becoming stressed and so on very often
not not the industry and the final point
is that with regard to what’s the best
approach then we’re talking about low
impact technology and products so we
know it’s Scotland you know we can look
at wind wave power we can look at tidal
power we can look in other countries as
solar energy and so on and we have risk
assessments we have public assessment
public health assessments of those
activities and they’re much better than
fracking so I think the line has always
been from a number of cautious
scientists if in doubt don’t and I think
the evidence is there that we shouldn’t
for individuals for nations and globally
thank you [Applause]