A new study funded in part by the MacArthur Foundation attempts to link fracking to low birth weights in newborn infants but falls flat.

Once again, we are reading a new study about how fracking is endangering children. Every other year, so it seems, one of these studies comes out and every time it is, in the end, proven to have been just as ridiculous of assertions as the last. Now, it’s low infant birth weights (again), funded (again) by a committee fractivist foundation.

We have already seen a study claiming asthma attacks were on the rise in areas where fracking is taking place. It just so happens, though, that  Brian Schwartz, Professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, had conducted the study. He’s also a Post Carbon Institute Fellow where one of the mottos is “Busting the Shale Hype.”  In that study, he claimed people living near shale gas wells are 1.5 to 4 times more likely to have an asthma attack. The reality, however, was the areas with the highest concentrations of asthma sufferers had little or no shale gas production. The report even admitted they had no real evidence their speculation was true, but that didn’t keep it out of the fear-inducing headlines, of course, which was the whole point.

Next, they tried to report fracking caused premature births in shale regions. A top-tier biostatistics analysis expert, recognizing the study for what it was, noted the researchers had used bad modeling, ignored estimation errors and hadn’t validated the metrics.

Read more:

http://naturalgasnow.org/new-study-tying-low-birth-weights-fracking...