A Pennsylvania researcher says her new mapping tool shows higher rates of several cancers in small communities near fracking sites and refineries, places she argues are too small for conventional epidemiology to count.

Environmental health scholar Lauren Minsky, the creator of the People’s Cancer Incidence Screening Tool (PCIST), presented her findings Wednesday in a webinar hosted by the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.

Minsky’s tool maps where cancer rates run higher than average in Pennsylvania’s small communities, and shows where refineries, fracking wells, and other pollution sources sit nearby. She says the maps show higher cancer rates clustering near fracking sites and refineries.

For instance, elevated rates of leukemia and lymphoma in children appear in Washington County, which PCIST says is heavily fracked, and elevated rates of laryngeal cancer in adults cluster along the Delaware River in Delaware County, near refineries and a trash incinerator.

In the city of Chester, Pennsylvania, home to refineries, oil tank farms, pipelines and the largest trash incinerator in the U.S., cancers from the rarest to the most common were found to be up to four times higher than the national average for those living near the sites.

“You can see here children playing on sports fields that have been built near the largest trash incinerator in the United States and a large refinery,” she said. “The sense in the community is that they’re just not having their concerns taken seriously.”

Canada faces similar concerns. Dr. Ulrike Meyer, a local physician in Dawson Creek, B.C., said exposure to contaminants from nearby fracking is causing an alarming frequency of cancers in that community.

The tool is consistent with findings from statistically significant epidemiological studies, Minsky told The Energy Mix. According to the PCIST website, it is designed to serve small communities whose health concerns have been dismissed by public health officials and epidemiologists because the community size is not large enough to represent statistical significance.

She compared that data against local lifestyle data and says there is little else that could explain the links her research found.

Minsky argues that two epidemiology tenets are limiting serious consideration of such concerns: one, that cancer is seen as a disease of individuals, primarily attributable to aging, lifestyle choices, genetics, and bad luck. The second is a devotion to statistical significance, which often requires more data than small communities can provide. 

“Every case of cancer counts,” states the PCIST website. “We set aside statistical priorities and measures of significance in order to prioritize human significance.”

To address the practical limitations of a small population size, the tool expands the temporal scale, calculating communities’ average annual cancer incidence over a period of 20 years.

“This longer time span compensates for the smaller geographical scale, allowing for the calculations of rates that are averaged temporally instead of spatially,” the site states. The 20-year average is divided by the population, and those incidence numbers compared to the United States as a whole. The tool allows residents to “use their human powers of perception to see where elevated cancer rates are contiguous and clustered.”

A study from the University of Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Department of Health in 2023 found children who were living near gas wells had a five to seven times higher chance of developing lymphoma. 

“We clearly know enough to act,” she said. “We have humanly significant evidence of these elevations, and not just in adults, but also in children and youth.”