Huge New Review of Fracking's Health Hazards Will Help Communities Fight It

A sweeping report that evolved from work that helped ban fracking in New York State has been released to help the public fight the practice as it pops up elsewhere across the country. Published last week by the Physicians for Social Responsibility (the group that won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for its work educating the public on the dangers of nuclear war) and the Concerned Health Professionals of New York (CHPNY), the updated report is an easy-to-read compendium of how fracking impacts our health, from the direct impact of wells and pipelines, to its role in exacerbating climate change.
“Wherever you live across the US there’s a piece of fracking infrastructure across your community. What you need to know about the health risks you’re being compelled to endure you can find in this report,” Sandra Steingraber, a biologist at Ithaca College and co-founder of CHPNY, told Earther. She is one of the compendium’s authors and was also involved in the first version of the report, which started out as a few pages in a letter to the New York governor that eventually helped lead to the state’s fracking ban in 2014.