An increase in the number of teens and young adults diagnosed with a rare cancer in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania has caused the state to look for a link between fracking and the disease.The investigation was sparked by a spate of Ewing’s sarcoma cases in and around Washington County, which has more Marcellus Shale gas wells than any other county in the state. In April 2019 state Department of Health found that the cases didn’t constitute a statistically significant cancer cluster. But affected families and other residents lobbied the governor for an investigation.

 The region is home to coal mining, oil drilling, chemical plants and a former uranium-processing facility.  Each year, about 250 children in the U.S. are diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare cancer of the bone or surrounding soft tissue, according to the National Institutes of Health.  In four counties in southwest Pennsylvania, 31 people were diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma from 2006 through 2017, according to state cancer data. That is a roughly 40% increase from the period from 1995 through 2005, when 22 people in the same area were diagnosed, according to state data. Residents point to two additional cases in 2018. Most troubling to many local residents is that the six cases in Washington County since 2008 occurred in one school district.

Other communities are studying potential health risks of fracking. In October 2019, Colorado regulators said they would tighten regulation of drilling after a state-funded study found that people living within 2,000 feet of oil-and-gas wells could have, in worst-case scenarios, an elevated risk for infrequent, short-term health effects such as nosebleeds and headaches from emissions.

Evelyn Talbott, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh, said Pennsylvania investigators should look at residents’ potential exposures to chemicals and to radiation from natural-gas sites. She said they also should look at the sealed waste site of the defunct uranium-processing plant…Since Pennsylvania’s first Marcellus Shale well was drilled in Washington County in 2003, more than 1,800 wells have been fracked there. Compressor stations, processing plants and pipelines have followed. Some residents worry that pollutants such as benzene from air emissions or radium from wastewater could affect people’s health.

Kris Maher, Cancer Cases Raise Fracking Fears, WSJ, Dec. 21, 2019

See also Shale gas development and cancer incidence in southwest Pennsylvania