HARRISBURG — Gov. Tom Corbett’s top health adviser said Friday that he wants to make Pennsylvania the first state to create a registry to track illnesses in communities near heavy drilling in the Marcellus Shale natural gas formation to determine what kind of impact, if any, the activity has on public health.

Health Secretary Eli Avila told Corbett’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission that creating such a registry is the timeliest and most important step the Department of Health could take, and that his agency is not aware of anything like it in other drilling states.

“We’re really at the frontiers of this and we can make a speedy example for all the other states,” Avila told the commission at its fourth meeting.

Collecting information on drilling-related health complaints, investigating them, centralizing the information in one database and then comparing illnesses in drilling communities with non-drilling communities could help refute or verify claims that drilling has an impact on public health, he said. The aggregation of data and information also would allow the Department of Health to make its findings public, in contrast to the privacy that surrounds its investigation into individual health complaints and the findings that may result.

The Marcellus Shale formation, considered the nation’s largest-known natural gas reservoir, lies primarily beneath Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia and Ohio. Pennsylvania is the center of activity, with more than 3,000 wells drilled in the past three years and thousands more planned in the coming years as thick shale emerges as an affordable, plentiful and profitable source of natural gas.

The rapid growth of deep shale drilling and its involvement of high-volume hydraulic fracturing, chemicals and often-toxic wastewater are spurring concerns in Pennsylvania about poisoned air and water.

“As drilling increases, I anticipate, at least in the short term, a proportionate increase in concerns and complaints which the department must be prepared to address,” he said.

In the past year or so, the Department of Health has received several dozen or so health complaints, he said.

One woman, Crystal Stroud of Granville Summit in northern Pennsylvania, told an anti-drilling rally in the Capitol this month that she is hearing from others in Bradford County about bizarre and sudden health problems that they blame on contaminated water from the area’s heavy drilling.

Stroud herself blames her barium poisoning on well water polluted by drilling near her home, and accused state agencies of turning a blind eye.

“I am extremely confused as to why our Health Department is not interested in these issues and no one from (the) Pennsylvania Health Department has contacted us, and why are they not investigating this?” Stroud, 29, told the crowd on June 7.