Clark et al. Environmental Health( 2026) 25:12 https:// doi. org / 10.1186 / s12940-025-01259-3
Environmental Health
RESEARCH Open Access
Residential proximity to active and abandoned oil and gas development and risk of childhood Ewing sarcoma in California
Cassandra J. Clark 1, 2 *, Nicholaus Johnson 2, Rong Wang 3, Eric C. Stewart 4, Logan G. Spector 1, Joseph L. Wiemels 5, Catherine Metayer 4, Nicole C. Deziel 2, 6 and Xiaomei Ma 3, 6
Abstract
Background Oil and gas development( OGD) has been linked to increased pediatric cancer risk, but the literature to date is focused on hematologic malignancies and active wells. The emergence of suspected clusters of cancers such as Ewing sarcoma in children living near OGD and widespread presence of abandoned wells warrants investigation.
Methods This study included 558 children born in California( 1982 – 2015) reported to the California Cancer Registry with a diagnosis of Ewing sarcoma at 0 – 19 years( 1988 – 2015), and 27,800 cancer-free controls frequency-matched to cases on birth-year( 50:1 ratio). We used birth address to assign prenatal OGD exposure to active( drilled or producing) and plugged / abandoned wells separately with inverse distance-squared weighted well counts at 5 and 10 km buffer sizes from three months before conception to birth. We evaluated potential exposure disparities and estimated odds ratios( OR) and 95 % confidence intervals( CI) for the association between prenatal OGD exposure and Ewing sarcoma risk using multivariable logistic regression.
Results Hispanic children were significantly more likely to be exposed to both active and abandoned OGD within 10 km than non-Hispanics( 40 % vs. 23 % and 14 % vs. 6 %, respectively). There were no associations between prenatal exposure to active OGD within 10 km and Ewing sarcoma risk( OR: 0.88 [ 95 % CI: 0.72 – 1.08 ]). However, children within 10 km of abandoned wells were 1.27 [ 0.96 – 1.66 ] times as likely to develop Ewing sarcoma as unexposed children; when stratified by ethnicity, this association appeared in Hispanic children only( 1.33 [ 0.95 – 1.88 ]).
Conclusion We did not identify an association between exposure to active OGD and pediatric Ewing sarcoma risk in California. Abandoned wells were associated with a suggestive increase in risk among Hispanic children, who were also more likely to be exposed to any OGD activity than non-Hispanic children. This disparity could have implications for other health outcomes including childhood cancers.
* Correspondence: Cassandra J. Clark clar1168 @ umn. edu 1 Division of Pediatric Epidemiology and Clinical Research, Department
of Pediatrics, University of Minnesota School of Medicine, Minneapolis, MN, USA 2 Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Yale School of Public
Health, New Haven, CT, USA
3 Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT, USA 4 Division of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of
California, Berkeley, CA, USA 5 Center for Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 6 Yale Comprehensive Cancer Center, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA
© The Author( s) 2026. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author( s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’ s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’ s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creati vecommons.org / licenses / by-nc-nd / 4.0 /.