A University of Utah study reported high ozone levels can harm fetal brain development in places with heavy oil drilling and production, including Utah’s Wasatch Front and Uinta Basin and Colorado’s northern Front Range, as detailed by local media outlet Real Vail .
What’s happening?
David O. Williams of Real Vail asked readers to recall a famous commercial: “You remember the ads from the ’80s, right? ‘This is your brain [man holds up an egg]. This is ozone [he points to a hot skillet, cracks the egg into it, holds up the sizzling skillet]. This is your brain on ozone. Any questions?’ Right, it was drugs, not ozone.”
But his point was that a new study , “Prenatal Ozone Exposure and Risk of Intellectual Disability in Children,” showed that prenatal exposure to ozone can damage developing brains, just like drugs can. “The same jarring imagery of a fried egg could apply to fetal brain development in places with higher-than-recommended levels of ozone,” Williams wrote.
In Colorado, Front Range monitoring stations exceeded EPA limits on 41 different days in 2024, the highest number since 2021 and more severe than all but two ozone seasons in the past 11 years…