Vet: Fracking potentially caused sick foals at Pennsylvania horse farm

Capri, a healthy filly, is one of the first foals born this year at Allerage Farm near Sayre, PA. Photo by Amber Pruchnik.

Editor's note: This report includes two stories – a mainbar on the study along with a column (on the right) challenging people to come forward if they have similar stories to tell. There is also an audio podcast interview with Dr. Kathleen Mullen.

While completing her residency at Cornell University, veterinarian Dr. Kathleen Mullen noticed an uptick in dysphagia – a difficulty in swallowing – among foals from a specific farm near Sayre, Pennsylvania.

“They came to the clinic with their mothers, because their farm manager and farm veterinarians noticed that when the foals tried to suckle from the dams, that instead of swallowing their milk normally, they would aspirate the milk – meaning the milk would go into their trachea,” she said. “It’s concerning because if too much milk goes down into the trachea and eventually the lungs, the foals can be at risk of aspirational pneumonia.”

The foals were also acting too calm or subdued.

“Foals are usually rambunctious, running around their stalls, but these foals would just lie around and be very calm,” she said. “It was very apparent the foals were abnormal.”

Ashleigh Bennett, hired in 2013 as farm manager at Allerage – an esteemed standardbred racehorse farm – was informed about the dysphagia concerns upon hire.

“It was heartbreaking to watch all these foals be sick and going through all of that,” she said.

According to Mullen, dysphagia is a rare condition, so to see a number of foals with the same condition from the same farm was a red flag.

“We weren’t sure why we were seeing all these foals from one particular farm with this unusual presentation,” she said. “In talking to the farm owners a little bit more, they became concerned that maybe the reason they were seeing all these problems at the farm had to do with something in the environment.”

Specifically, those involved were concerned about a recently drilled fracking well located “immediately adjacent to the farm,” said Mullen. “There are two water wells on the farm. They are located approximately 1,500 feet from the gas pad well. Also, within two-and-a-half miles of the farm, there are six additional gas well pads. The farm is located where there is a pretty significant concentration of natural gas production.”

The owners have a second horse farm in New York state – which does not allow fracking – and the incidence of dysphagia was notably lower.

“It seemed like a really unique study opportunity because both farms use the same source of feed – hay and grain – and they use the same source for bedding,” Mullen said. “Really, the only thing that differed was the environment.”

In addition, there was movement at times of pregnant mares between the two facilities, which Mullen admitted “naturally offered the crossover design of a study.

“When mares would be in gestation in Pennsylvania and then be moved to the New York farm to foal out, they didn’t have problems. But when they were at the New York farm and transferred to the Pennsylvania farm to foal there, they sometimes would have dysphagic foals,” suggesting that the water being consumed in the last few weeks by the mothers prior to foaling could be the culprit.

Through a variety of diagnostics on the sick foals, Mullen said that she and her team were able to rule out the more common causes of dysphagia, including “lead toxicity, vitamin E or selenium deficiency and some versions of congenital malformations like cleft palate.”

It was important to her to be thorough in the testing so results weren’t skewed by any sort of bias.

“Fracking was sort of the elephant in the room, so to speak, but we didn’t just want to assume that what we were seeing was related to fracking, so we really tried to take a broad approach,” she said. “We collected soil samples, water samples and we had continuous monitoring of the air on both farms. We also ran a battery of tests on the mares and foals to see if they had any nutritional deficiencies that could explain what we were seeing.”

They found no differences between farms in air quality. They found only subtle differences via the soil analysis, according to Mullen, involving heavy metals and other elements. There were also minor differences in the mineral contents of the well water on the two farms.

“But the major difference we saw was in the continuous sampling of well water. The farm in Pennsylvania had several polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the well water that were at higher levels than the New York farm,” said Mullen. “Whether that was due to contamination from fracking seemed likely, but there is no definitive evidence of that at this point. However, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons can be components of natural gas. We were certainly concerned about the elevated levels found at the Pennsylvania farm compared to the levels at the New York farm.”

While there are no studies that have looked at the health impacts of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons on horse breeds, according to Mullen, there are studies in humans that these chemicals can be harmful, “especially when pregnant women are exposed to them. They have been linked to things like fetal growth reduction and cognitive developmental delay, reduced IQ and behavioral disorders in children.”

During the course of Mullen’s study at the farm, a water treatment and filtration system was installed.

“What we found was after the system was installed, the levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the Pennsylvania farm’s water were very similar to those in the New York farm water,” Mullen said. “In addition, the frequency of dysphagic foals on the Pennsylvania farm decreased. So we really think that the chemicals we found in the water were contributing to the syndrome that the farm was experiencing.”

According to Bennett, some other changes were instituted at the farm, including using vitamin E and selenium supplements along with tweaks to the stall surfaces and food sources.

“The horses are doing great,” she said.

Mullen and her team’s study of the two farms and the potential link to fracking was published this past summer in Science of the Total Environment. A follow-up study looking at adult horses that were born dysphagic was published this past fall in the Equine Veterinary Journal.

“We wanted to know if the horses that were formerly dysphagic – if that affected their performances as racehorses,” she said. “We found that it had no effect on their performance as racehorses as far as we could tell from the metrics that we used.”

Overall, Mullen admitted that she has learned a lot from her work on these studies.

“When things just don’t make sense and aren’t adding up, you really have to go digging and do a lot of investigative work,” she said. “It would have been easy to point our fingers at fracking and say that this is definitely the cause, but by taking this broader approach by looking at the environment at both farms, it gave us a chance to hone in and say, ‘OK, we do think that what is found in the well water could be associated with fracking.’”

The potential connection is one that requires more studies – especially considering the connection between horses and humans, she added.

“Perhaps these horses are a sentinel species for the health risks associated with fracking. If we are seeing these problems in horses, could these problems exist in humans, and that’s what’s most concerning,” she said. “It also raises questions on if food animals could be affected, and what effect would that have on our food supply?”

In order to develop a clearer picture of what is going on, Mullen asks farmers, veterinarians and others to come forward if they have seen similar situations.

“I would like to encourage others to have an open mind and to really be willing to share concerns they have,” she said. “If we are having issues in neonatal horses, what does it mean for infants that are being born in that environment?”

Veterinarian Dr. Kathleen Mullen checks out a horse as part of her work at Littleton Equine in Colorado.

Listen to Dr. Kathleen Mullen's full Middle Susquehanna Riverkeeper podcast interview here:

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Column: You can help us collect, connect the dots

Column by  Riverkeeper John Zaktansky:

Connect two dots and you have a line. 
​
Three, a triangle. Four, some variation of a rectangle.

How about 100 dots? A thousand?

As a kid, I used to love doing the dot-to-dot or connect-the-dot activities in publications like Highlights magazine. It didn’t usually take too much imagination to figure out what the picture was going to be – even before putting pencil to paper.

As I got older, those connect-the-dot pages became more complex. Twenty or thirty points to connect evolved into 100 or more. An activity that used to take a few minutes was now much more time-intensive. However, the end results were much more impressive. Details popped and a clearer image came into view as the final dots were connected to the bigger picture.

That’s the mental picture one should take away from the recent study by veterinarian Kathleen Mullen and her team from Cornell University that looks at the potential connection between sick foals and the fracking chemicals that may have caused it.

“It is a really striking study in that we don’t always see veterinarians involved in cases connected to fracking and environmental issues. It is certainly a small study, but as with most studies related to fracking, it is hard to say with complete certainty that fracking caused the issue – that is true even in larger epidemiological studies,” said Kristina Marusic, a reporter for Environmental Health News, which ran a story about Mullen’s study in May of 2020. “She spent years studying two different farms, looking at every other factor that could contribute to the issue and ruling them out, but you still can’t say it proves fracking chemicals in the water caused the problem beyond a shadow of a doubt.

“What it does, however, is get the information out there where others can process it, and maybe they have similar stories and maybe that leads to a bigger finding that is more conclusive,” she said. “There is a much larger body of literature for fracking health impacts on humans – there are now 12 years of scientific research collected. If you have 10 studies that suggest that, for example, a pregnant mother is more likely to have a baby with a lower-than-average birth weight the closer she lives to a fracking well, that has more merit than one study.”

Anthony Ingraffea, longtime lead professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University with more than a decade of experience in fracking research and writing, was approached by Mullen early in her study to provide insight on the ways that fracking could be causing an increase in polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that may have triggered dysphagia for a number of foals.

“We considered the possibility of surface spills leaching down into the water table, or the leaking of materials either going down the well or coming back up into an underground source of drinking water,” he said, although despite their best efforts to find a definitive cause of the dysphagia spike in foals from this specific farm, it isn't conclusive that elevated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the water caused the issue, or that fracking was the cause of the elevated compounds in the horses' drinking water.

“All the intriguing dots suggest a certain outcome, but aren’t positively positive – I consider it more curiously correlative, and as a scientist, that is the best I can say,” said Ingraffea. “If you can’t prove causality, then it is only correlation. As a scientist, we are bound by the rules of the game. It is so hard to prove causality (in these sort of cases) because there are so many moving targets. It can be very frustrating for me, but especially so for those impacted by the situation.”

Considering the growth of fracking across the state in the past decade-plus, the number of new wells dug, the number of wells abandoned, the opportunities for a negative impact within the environment – along with the countless studies surrounding all of these scenarios – likely number in the millions, Ingraffea estimated.

“Speaking as a scientist with training in mathematics and probability, you can’t roll a dice a million times without snake eyes coming up,” he said.

Considering that, Mullen’s study becomes an important dot in a much larger environmentally focused connect-the-dot experience.

“This paper will be cited again and again as other similar cases develop in other locations, not just in Pennsylvania. Science was done here. The community was served by this research and the publication of it,” Ingraffea said. “If they didn’t do the work, there would be no dot to connect.”

Whether this dot is part of a bigger picture that more conclusively highlights some of the potential health concerns of fracking – or one that eventually suggests the opposite – remains to be seen. 

To get to that point of clarity, we need more data – more dots.

To that end, as Middle Susquehanna Riverkeeper, I encourage anyone who may have important information to share – please do so.

​Maybe you have seen a trend of illness in animals on your farm (or one you visit) that just doesn’t add up and may be due to something in the water. Or maybe you’ve seen evidence of a spill or leak. Perhaps you work with a company where you know there is an issue that isn’t being addressed – or maybe you have valuable insight that more definitively proves that your group is going above and beyond the call of duty to protect the environment and reduce potential negative ripple effects.

I have no pre-set agenda in this request, no side-taking, leaning or bias. As Riverkeeper, my goal is simply to protect and promote our river-based resources.

Your information could provide the necessary dots needed to get us closer to that goal.

I am available via email at [email protected]

• ​You can email Dr. Kathleen Mullen directly by clicking here.
• Mullen’s main study can be read by clicking here.
• Two early stories on the dysphagic foals were published in 2016, one via USA Today's Pressconnects and the other on harnesslink.com
• A more recent dive into the story was written by Kristina Marusic for Environmental Health News on May 29, 2020.
• The most recent piece, published on Dec. 10, 2020, was shared in The Horse magazine.​

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