The Alberta government must do a long-term, multimillion-dollar study to determine if the petroleum industry’s sour-gas emissions are harming people’s health, says a prominent public health physician who was fired after supporting the Kyoto accord.
Dr. David Swann, a former provincial medical officer of health, said there is sufficient public concern and anecdotal evidence – including doctors’ reports – for Alberta Health and Wellness to fund an unprecedented study into the health effects of low-level, chronic exposure to sour-gas emissions.
“There’s a lot of concern in the communities and there’s no question that we don’t have the research to tell us, in relation to exposures, what the health implications are,” Swann told Business Edge.
“We need a long-term study and a population – a cohort of people – that are prepared to be followed for several years.”
Controversy in Alberta over sour-gas emissions became front-page news in recent years when Grande Prairie area farmer Wiebo Ludwig was convicted and sent to prison for five charges related to oilpatch bombing and vandalism.
Ludwig, released last year after serving two-thirds of a 28-month sentence, blamed gas field flaring for harming his land, livestock and family.
Swann said that Alberta Health should launch a major study of sour gas and its impact on human health as soon as results are available from a continuing $17-million, three-year Western Canada study into the effects of sour-gas flaring emissions on beef cattle productivity and wildlife.
Whatever the animal study finds, Swann added, “I think there’s a strong need in Alberta to look at long-term health implications (in people).”
The Western Canada study had originally included a human health component along with the animal health research, which involves about 33,000 beef cattle in Alberta, B.C. and Saskatchewan.
But Alberta Health decided to hold off on the human health aspect and wait for the animal study results, which aren’t expected until mid-2005.
Alberta Health spokesman Howard May rejected Swann’s argument that public concern and anecdotal evidence are sufficient reasons to go ahead with the human health component, regardless of what the animal health study finds.
“Favouring anecdotal evidence over scientific has never been, and never will be, an appropriate way to develop sound policy,” May said.
Michael O’Connell, project manager for the independent Western Interprovincial Scientific Studies Association (WISSA), which is overseeing the animal health study, said it’s up to Alberta Health to decide whether the human health component will proceed.
“It’s not our (WISSA’s) decision . . . and if the funding’s not there, we can’t do the human health study,” O’Connell said.
Swann said he and other public health physicians are worried that Alberta Health won’t follow through on doing the human health study. “We want to be sure that this is not going to be forgotten, neglected, simply bypassed as a result of some kind of reassurance that we might get from the animal study,” Swann said.
Dr. Tee Guidotti, co-chair of the scientific advisory panel for WISSA, says the animal health study is an “outstanding example of good science and innovative scientific management.”
Its results “will be directly relevant to human health because animal studies reveal what effects may occur in humans, if any,” Guidotti said.
Alberta Health’s May pointed out that through the Community Exposure and Health Effects Program, the department has been doing a series of health studies in communities throughout the province since 1998.
Researchers measured people’s exposure to indoor and outdoor airborne contaminants and checked the rates of chronic health conditions, serious illness and death.
Those studies have given Fort Saskatchewan, Grande Prairie and Fort McMurray residents a clean bill of health and “turned up nothing” in terms of a public health risk, May said.
David Pryce, vice-president of Western Canada operations at the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said CAPP has accepted that Alberta Health wants to wait for the results from the Western Canada animal health study to help design any future human health component, if required.
In the meantime, CAPP has contributed $100,000 toward what will be the world’s first research to expose healthy human volunteers inside laboratory chambers to low-level concentrations of hydrogen sulphide gas (present in sour-gas emissions). The pilot phase of this research, being led by a New York university, is expected to begin this fall.
Pryce also noted that Alberta’s oil and gas industry, working with the multi-stakeholder Clean Air Strategic Alliance, has voluntarily reduced the total amount of flaring emissions across the province by 60 per cent since 1996.
The industry also has been funding technology research to improve flaring efficiency and design, Pryce said. “There’s a lot going on in anticipation of the concerns the public has and in anticipation that there are studies (currently being done) that may tell us something that will inform future needs.”
WISSA’s O’Connell said that researchers in the Western Canada animal health study have finished collecting all their data in the field.
Verifying, integrating and analysing this mountain of data will take the rest of this year and all of next year, he said.
The study is on track to issue a public report on its findings in the summer of 2005, O’Connell said. “I think it’s still very positive.”
Last fall, Swann was fired as medical officer of health for the Palliser Health Authority in southern Alberta after publicly endorsing the Kyoto accord to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
He declined an offer of reinstatement. He now teaches part-time in the University of Calgary’s community health sciences department and is engaged in humanitarian work in Iraq.
