BP’s effort to mitigate the damage done by the Deepwater Horizon spill&mdash both to the Gulf of Mexico and to the oil company’s reputation&mdash is in full throttle. Today, the company released documents relating to an internal investigation that shifted most of the blame to the contractors and employees of the rig.
Yesterday BP announced that it would contribute $10 million to a new US government initiative that will examine the health impacts of the oil spill. The money comes from a $500 million research program set up by BP called the Gulf Coast Research Initiative. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will foot another $10 million for the government program, which will focus on relief workers that were exposed to oil, oil byproducts, and dispersants used during the cleanup efforts.
A subsection of the NIH, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), will be charged with conducting the research. The study’s lead researcher, Dale Sandler, chief of the Epidemiology Branch at NIEHS, said in an NIH statement that they’ll be enrolling workers involved in all aspects of the cleanup, both offshore and on land, as well as workers who were not exposed to oil, who will be used as controls.
Oil contains a number of compounds that threaten human health, among them:
&mdash volatile organic compounds(VOCs), such as benzene, toluene, and xylene, that can damage the respiratory and central nervous systems. Benzene is also linked to leukemia.
&mdash polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), such as naphthalene, which is a known mutagen and “reasonably anticipated to cause cancer”, according to the National Toxicology Program.
&mdash hydrogen sulfide gas, which presents severe danger to the brain and central nervous system.
An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association reviews some of the health complaints seen during in the early days of the oil spill. Over 300 people, mostly cleanup workers, sought medical treatment for a wide range of symptoms, among them dizziness, nausea, vomiting, headaches, and coughing.
The paper also mentions a previous study of 858 people involved in the cleanup of a 2002 oil spill in Spain. The workers had increased DNA damage and lower CD4 cell count levels after their work on the beaches.
BP’s previous attempts to court scientists have attracted some controversy, especially when the Alabama Press-Telegram obtained a copy of the contract offered to researchers. Under the terms of that arrangement, any scientist that agreed to consult for BP would be prohibited from publishing or talking about his or her data at least three years.
“Clean-up workers are likely to be the most heavily exposed of all population groups in the Gulf Coast region,” Sandler said in the NIH statement. “What we learn from this study may help us prepare for future incidents that put clean-up workers at risk.”
While the NIH initiative is certainly a valuable effort, there are some long-term health effects of the oil spill felt by the people of the Gulf Coast&mdash such as the stress caused by economic devastation&mdash that may prove harder to quantify.
Image by the US Coast Guard via Wikimedia Commons
