SB 243: Keeping Fracking Under Wraps in West Virginia

It looks like West Virginia is following in the footsteps of other states like Pennsylvania with a new law that would place gag orders on doctors, nurses, and any other health professional who might be treating a person who has been sickened by the chemicals used in fracking. As with the Pennsylvania law, West Virginia’s Senate Bill 243 requires that a fracking operation disclose the constituents of their fracking mixture to a health care professional when such an individual requests that information. But the heath care professional cannot further disclose that information, event to the person who has been made ill by the fracking chemicals.

            SB 243 has passed the West Virginia Senate and is now before the West Virginia House Judiciary Committee. Like “Ag Gag” laws, this is just more help from governors and state houses to make dubious industry operations and practices opaque to the American public.

Orwell and Fracking

In Pennsylvania the state legislature passed and the governor just signed into law HB 1950, a law regulating fracking. Fracking is the high-pressure injection of fluids into rock formations to free up fossil fuel for drilling. Besides water, there are a number of other fluids used in fracking. Lots of different chemicals are in these fluids, many of which raise health concerns.

Many environmentalists and local communities denounce the law because it removes from local communities their ability to restrict fracking in their communities. Besides the concerns of local communities, the law goes beyond the realm of oil and natural gas and into regulating the practice of medicine, and in so doing becomes truly Orwellian. If a doctor or other health professional determines that chemicals that entered the water supply due to fracking poisoned someone, that physician or other professional cannot alert others to the danger posed by the well water. As the law says, the health professional “shall maintain the information as confidential.” The companies doing the fracking can also get a written statement of confidentiality from the health professional or doctor.

Despite the dangers to others, the doctor can’t call the newspaper or local broadcast stations; he can’t alert other physicians; he can’t even let other persons living in the poisoned person’s household know about the poison. This runs counter to all of our traditions of public health and modern medicine. What if John Snow had been restricted from alerting nineteenth century Londoners to the dangers of that one cholera infected well? What if cigarette companies managed to get similar legislation passed in the 1950s just as the medical community was finding more connections between smoking and heart disease, cancer, and emphysema?

Among a government’s most essential functions is public health. The Romans had public health laws. Public health is in the bible, too*. If our governments abrogate responsibility for one of their essential functions to help the energy industries, what are they good for?

*Deuteronomy 23: 12-13: Designate a place outside your camp where you can go to relieve yourself. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement.