Health concerns associated with unconventional gas mining in rural Australia.

CONTEXT: Many governments globally are investigating the benefits and risks associated with unconventional gas mining for shale, tight and coal seam gas (coalbed methane) to determine whether the industry should proceed in their jurisdiction. Most locations likely to be developed are in rural areas, with potential impact on farmers and small communities. Despite significant health concerns, public health knowledge and growing evidence are often overlooked in decision-making. It is difficult to gain a broad but accurate understanding of the health concerns for rural communities because the evidence has grown very recently and rapidly, is complex and largely based in the USA, where the industry is advanced. In 2016, a concerned South Australian beef and lamb farmer in an area targeted for potential unconventional gas development organised visits to homes in developed unconventional gas areas of Pennsylvania and forums with leading researchers and lawyers in Pennsylvania and New York. Guided by priorities identified during this trip, this communication concisely distils the research evidence on these key concerns, highlighting the Australian situation where evidence exists. It summarises key information of particular concern to rural regions, using Australia as an example, to assist rural health professionals to be better prepared to engage in decision-making and address the challenges associated with this new industry. ISSUES: Discussions with communities and experts, supported by the expanding research from the USA and Australia, revealed increasing health concerns in six key areas. These are absence of a safe solution to the toxic wastewater management problems, air pollution, land and water competition, mental health and psychosocial wellbeing risks, fugitive methane emissions and lack of proven regulatory regimes. Emerging epidemiological studies suggesting interference with foetal development and birth outcomes, and exacerbation of asthma conditions, are particularly concerning to rural families and livestock. LESSONS LEARNED: Rural residents in potentially affected areas should be supported to access and interpret the best current evidence regarding the multiple health concerns associated with unconventional gas mining. This knowledge should be part of wider discourse and decision-making processes driving local economic development and national and global energy choices.

Outcome predictability biases learning.

Much of contemporary associative learning research is focused on understanding how and when the associative history of cues affects later learning about those cues. Very little work has investigated the effects of the associative history of outcomes on human learning. Three experiments extended the "learned irrelevance" paradigm from the animal conditioning literature to examine the influence of an outcome's prior predictability on subsequent learning of relationships between cues and that outcome. All 3 experiments found evidence for the idea that learning is biased by the prior predictability of the outcome. Previously predictable outcomes were readily associated with novel predictive cues, whereas previously unpredictable outcomes were more readily associated with novel nonpredictive cues. This finding highlights the importance of considering the associative history of outcomes, as well as cues, when interpreting multistage designs. Associative and cognitive explanations of this certainty matching effect are discussed.