Congenital heart defects and neural tube defects are the most common issues

Jan 31, 2014 19:26 GMT  ·  By

According to a team of Colorado School of Public Health researchers, pregnant women who live close to fracking sites are more likely to deliver offspring suffering with various birth defects than women who live at a considerable distance from such areas.

The scientists base their claims on data collected while analyzing as many as 124,842 medical records concerning births documented in the state of Colorado between the years 1996 and 2009.

According to Environmental Health News, the researchers found that the risk of birth defects increased or decreased depending on how close to a fracking site a woman lived while pregnant.

More precisely, they found that the mothers-to-be who had just 10 miles (about 16.1 kilometers) or less between their home and a fracking site were the ones most likely to give birth to a child who had a birth defect.

By the looks of it, the health issues that the children of such women most often displayed were congenital heart defects or neural tube defects, i.e. deformities in the spine or in the brain.

“We observed an association between density and proximity of natural gas wells within a 10-mile radius of maternal residence and prevalence of CHDs and possibly neural tube defects,” the scientists say.

“These findings suggest that fracking causes babies to be deformed – the more we learn about fracking, the worse it gets. If you live near a fracking site and you want to have a healthy baby, you should consider moving,” adds Gary Wockner with Clean Water Action's Colorado program.

The specialists detail that, in the case of women living within a 10-mile radius of a fracking site, the rate of congenital heart defects was one of 18 per 1,000. In the case of women who had no such sites in their proximity, the rate was one of 13 per 1,000.

As far as neural tube defects are concerned, the rate for women living close to fracking sites was 2.87 per 3,000. For those living in areas with no wells, it was one of 1.2 per 3,000.

The researchers suspect this increase in the risk of birth defects is due to the fact that exploitation projects  that involve fracking release several harmful chemical compounds into the environment. These compounds can come either from the drilling process itself, or from the infrastructure needed to exploit wells.