Is Fracking Contaminating U.S. Livestock?
Like canaries sent into coal mines to warn of breathing hazards, livestock in areas where hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) is occurring are getting sick and dropping dead in alarming numbers, according to the only peer-reviewed scientific study of the impact of fracking on animals. And if cattle are getting sick because of fracking, what about the health of people who later drink their milk or eat their flesh?
The study, authored by Prof. Robert Oswald of Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and practicing veterinarian Michele Bamberger, compiles case studies of 24 farmers in 6 states whose livestock experienced neurological, reproductive and acute gastrointestinal problems after exposure to fracking chemicals in the water or air.
The case studies include 17 Louisiana cows that died of respiratory failure after an hour’s exposure to spilled fracking fluid; 70 Pennsylvania cows that died after 140 of them were exposed to fracking wastewater from an impoundment breach; and a Pennsylvania herd whose pregnant cows had a 50% rate of stillborn calves after grazing in a pasture contaminated by fracking chemicals from an overflowing waste pit.
Fracking a single well requires up to 7 million gallons of water, as well as an additional 400,000 gallons of additives. A 2011 study compiled a list of 632 chemicals used in natural-gas production and determined that 75% could affect the skin, eyes, other sensory organs, and the respiratory and gastrointestinal systems; 40-50% could affect the brain/nervous system, immune and cardiovascular systems, and the kidneys; 37% could affect the endocrine system; and 25% could cause cancer and mutations.
http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/is-fracking-contaminating-us-livestock-121203?news=846369
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Fracking Our Food Supply
By Elizabeth Royte, Nation of Change
01 December 12
In a Brooklyn winery on a sultry July evening, an elegant crowd sips rosé and nibbles trout plucked from the gin-clear streams of upstate New York. The diners are here, with their checkbooks, to support a group called Chefs for the Marcellus, which works to protect the food shed upon which hundreds of regional farm-to-fork restaurants depend. The food shed is coincident with the Marcellus Shale, a geologic formation that arcs northeast from West Virginia through Pennsylvania and into New York State. As everyone invited here knows, the region is both agriculturally and energy rich, with vast quantities of natural gas sequestered deep below its fertile fields and forests.
In Pennsylvania, the oil and gas industry is already on a tear - drilling thousands of feet into ancient seabeds, then repeatedly fracturing (or "fracking"
these wells with millions of gallons of highly pressurized, chemically laced water, which shatters the surrounding shale and releases fossil fuels. New York, meanwhile, is on its own natural-resource tear, with hundreds of newly opened breweries, wineries, organic dairies and pastured livestock operations - all of them capitalizing on the metropolitan area's hunger to localize its diet.
But there's growing evidence that these two impulses, toward energy and food independence, may be at odds with each other.
Tonight's guests have heard about residential drinking wells tainted by fracking fluids in Pennsylvania, Wyoming and Colorado. They've read about lingering rashes, nosebleeds and respiratory trauma in oil-patch communities, which are mostly rural, undeveloped, and lacking in political influence and economic prospects. The trout nibblers in the winery sympathize with the suffering of those communities. But their main concern tonight is a more insidious matter: the potential for drilling and fracking operations to contaminate our food. The early evidence from heavily fracked regions, especially from ranchers, is not reassuring.
Jacki Schilke and her sixty cattle live in the top left corner of North Dakota, a windswept, golden-hued landscape in the heart of the Bakken Shale. Schilke's neighbors love her black Angus beef, but she's no longer sharing or eating it - not since fracking began on thirty-two oil and gas wells within three miles of her 160-acre ranch and five of her cows dropped dead. Schilke herself is in poor health. A handsome 53-year-old with a faded blond ponytail and direct blue eyes, she often feels lightheaded when she ventures outside. She limps and has chronic pain in her lungs, as well as rashes that have lingered for a year. Once, a visit to the barn ended with respiratory distress and a trip to the emergency room. Schilke also has back pain linked with overworked kidneys, and on some mornings she urinates a stream of blood.
more, much more...
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/14816-focus-fracking-our-food-supply
