CDC Wants to Track Fracking Chemicals

Susan Phillips

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Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

January 10, 2012 | 3:21 PM

A top government public health official says not enough is known about the chemicals used in the natural gas drilling process. Vikas Kapil is the Chief Medical Officer and the Associate Director for Science at the Centers for Disease Control and the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry. Kapil spoke this week at a conference on the public health impacts of shale gas production in Arlington, Va.
“But even if we did have a detailed list, [of chemicals used to extract natural gas]” said Kapil, “for many of these, the toxicology literature is lacking.”
Kapil says the CDC operates the best biomonitoring laboratories in the world, which could be used to track human exposure to hazardous chemicals used in gas drilling and monitor their health impacts.
He says the program has the capacity to test blood and urine samples for more than 400 chemicals that may exist in the blood at very low levels. The agency also publishes toxicological profiles for 174 different chemicals. But he says that’s just a fraction of the 60,000 to 80,000 chemicals currently in use in our environment.
“Establishing a link between exposure and health outcomes is really difficult,” said Kapil.
He says theCDC’s Natinal Environmental Public Health Tracking Program oshould be applied to natural gas production. In fact, he says Congress recently instructed the agency to do just that.