Sara Rasmussen and Heather Harr – Fracking and Public Health

On this episode we’ve got two guests, Heather Harr and Sara Rasmussen – we’re talking about the impacts of fracking on public health.

Heather Harr is the project director for the League of Women Voters in Pennsylvania’s Straight Scoop on Shale Drilling. She talks about the upcoming Shale and Public Health Conference, and also shares some valuable resources about public health impacts of fracking. The conference is for health professionals and community members interested in how the fracking industry impacts public health.

Sara Rasmussen MHS, who you’ll hear in the second half of this episode, published new research that shows a clear connection between fracking and asthma.

She is a PhD candidate in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. She has been involved in three studies on unconventional natural gas development and health outcomes. In this interview Sara explains how they collected data to show the impacts of fracking on public health.

I also learned a new word – epidemiology, which is (noun) “the branch of medicine that deals with the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health”. This is why I’m asking the questions here 😉

As Mentioned in This Episode:

• Upcoming Shale and Public Health Conference – November 16th, 2016
• The Pennsylvania League of Women Voters
• Shale Info & Resources from the Pennsylvania League of Women Voters
• Study :
  • Association Between Unconventional Natural Gas Development in the Marcellus Shale and Asthma Exacerbations
• https://skytruth.org/