In a Gas Boom, Looking for Answers on Health Questions
From: Reid Frazier
Series: Breaking the Land: Marcellus Shale and the Gas Age
Length: 09:50
It started about two years ago, for Amy Pare. That’s when patients started coming into her plastic surgery practice near Pittsburgh with what looked like acne on their faces. They looked like bad lesions that bled, but never quite healed. What did her patients have in common? They all lived near gas wells. Doctors like Pare are trying to find out if fracking for natural gas could make people sick. The evidence so far is sketchy, and getting money to study the costs of shale will be difficult. This story looks at the potential health costs, and benefits, of shale gas extraction.
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Piece Description
It started about two years ago, for Amy Pare. That’s when patients started coming into her plastic surgery practice near Pittsburgh with what looked like acne on their faces. They looked like bad lesions that bled, but never quite healed. What did her patients have in common? They all lived near gas wells. Doctors like Pare are trying to find out if fracking for natural gas could make people sick. The evidence so far is sketchy, and getting money to study the costs of shale will be difficult. This story looks at the potential health costs, and benefits, of shale gas extraction.
Transcript
Fracking and Health Short Version Version
FRAZIER:
Amy Pare (Pa-RAY) is a plastic surgeon. She makes her living doing lifts, tucks and augmentations. So it’s remarkable that she finds herself in the middle of a public health debate. It started about two years ago.
PARE:
We started to have more patients that would have open areas or recalcitrant lesions, that just kind of bled, ulcerated, didn’t quite heal. And usually they’re on your face.
FRAZIER:
Pare’s first concern was skin cancer. So she took biopsies.
PARE: And when we would send them off to a lab, they wouldn’t come back as a cancer but they wouldn’t come back normal.
FRAZIER: The patients also had headaches and were acting lethargic.
PARE: And then we thought, ‘Well, are these patients exposed to anything?’ So then we would ask the patients are they exposed to anything at work or at home?
FRAZIER: It turned out, many of the patients had one thing in common, they all...
Read the full transcript
Fracking and Health Full length Version
PARE: So, how’d you do?
GIRL: Good
PARE: Not too bad?
GIRL: No
FRAZIER: Amy Paré is a plastic surgeon. She does lifts and tucks, and breast implants. Today she’s taking sutures out of a patient who had a mole removed.
PARE: I may put a little bit of peroxide in on there to dry it off a little bit.?
FRAZIER: Cosmetic procedures like this patient’s are Paré’s specialty. So it’s remarkable that she finds herself in the middle of a public health debate. It started about two years ago.
PARE: We started to have more patients that would have open areas or recalcitrant lesions, that bled, ulcerated, didn’t quite heal. And usually they’re on your face.
FRAZIER: Paré’s first concern was skin cancer. So she took biopsies of the patients.
PARE: And when we would send them off to a lab, they wouldn’t come back as a cancer but they wouldn’t come back normal.
FRAZIER: On top of the skin problems, the...
Read the full transcript
