In case you missed the news on Friday, the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment put the kibosh on fractivsts’ attempts use medical quackery to claim that oil and gas development is harmful to kids.
Here’s the backstory. A mother in Lafayette, Elizabeth Ewaskowitz, had her son’s blood tested for something called “volatile organic compounds” and found her son was in the 85th percentile for benzene. Sounds dire, right?
Not exactly. The CDPHE is asking everyone to take a deep breath. Here is what the CDPHE’s chief toxicologist, Mike Van Dyke, told Denver7 news.
“I think these blood tests are a huge challenge. These blood tests really require really specialized methods. They require really specialized techniques to ensure there’s not contamination. What we’re aware of is really, at the levels we’re talking about … we’re only aware of one laboratory in the country who can analyze consistently at those levels, and that’s the CDC laboratory.”
Reading between the lines here: don’t take your kids to a doctor in a strip mall and expect to have the kind of specialized tests to get an actionable result.
But, hey, fractivists won’t let that get in the way of the narrative they’re trying to spin here.
While Ewaskowitz claims she’s not anti-oil and gas, she also says in the clip, “If it’s not from the fracking, then where?”
The CDPHE rattled off a list of potential places and locations where her son may have come into contact with benzene.
Again, fractivists rarely let science-based facts get in the way of a good narrative.