Gulf Oil Spill Voluneeters Dying

this woman was a volunteer working to clean up the gulf oil spill. the companies claimed that the spill would have no ill health effects on the surrounding environment but obviously they lied as she's now very sick. imagine what the people and animals who live in that area might be coming down with.

My sister and nieces live on the coast. Hope they don't get poisoned.

http://www.louisianaweekly.com/news.php?viewStory=4038

excerpt:

Editor’s Note: Nearly a year after the BP oil spill, people living along the Gulf of Mexico are still feeling the effect of the disaster, the largest oil catastrophe in history. To learn more about the spill’s health effects, Dr. Erin Marcus recently spoke with Dr. Gina Solomon, an associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and Senior Scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Dr. Solomon was on the Louisiana coast during the oil spill, studying its environmental effects.

What health effects have been seen so far? What kinds of symptoms are residents experiencing?

A wide array of health concerns have been reported. The predominant complaint is dermal (skin rashes) such as eczema. Many (symptoms) are nonspecific: head?aches, confusion, memory problems, upper and lower respiratory symptoms, asthma, persistent cough, bronchitis, complaints of gastro-intestinal symptoms, episo?dic diarrhea.

There have been a couple of well-publicized cases of people who have become very sick with health issues that have not been sorted out. These individual stories are flying and there’s public concern, but it’s hard to make clear links. We’re struggling to determine how much is related to the oil and how much is coincidence.

The other set of issues is that people are under immense psychological strain due to economic insecurity and the effect of the spill on the gulf seafood industry. People are hurting. This was already an area of the country with poor health coverage and poor access to health care. It’s greatly increased the level of worry about health problems. The psychosocial issues are huge — anxiety, depression, symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.

What health effects do you anticipate will occur?

My biggest concern is for the workers who were offshore doing cleanup. Studies of past oil spills have shown chronic respiratory problems after the Exxon Valdez spill, and markers of DNA damage after a spill off the coast of Spain. It will be important to look for signs of chronic bronchitis and markers of DNA damage that could precipitate cancer or birth defects.

There are very well-documented psychological effects from oil spills both in clean-up workers and residents. This was documented after the Exxon Valdez spill. The psychological effects run the gamut from depression, to anxiety disorder, to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), to higher rates of substance abuse and suicide and intimate partner violence. There already was an uptick in mental health issues after Katrina and this was a second hit. It’s not the same as the PTSD you see in war veterans with flashbacks – instead, [people suffer] sleep disorders and hyper-vigilance and inability to get the oil spill off their minds.

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what is really fucked, is that situations like this highlight the decrepit state of our country's health care system. and so many people are unable to make that connection.

You guys read about the company that was running the rig getting "safety bonuses"?

yes.

i'd say it's unbelievable but it seems to be par for the course these days.

is there a special place in hell for these fools or do i have to torture em myself

Here's the article for those who haven't seen it.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/04/04/gulf.spill.bonuses/index.html?hpt=T2

Reminds me of September 11th in that the hero's are dying and the people who

claimed "it's safe" are busy getting rich.

of course the goverment is gonna tell you what you wanna hear. there job is to not let people panic. so they gonna bullshit you and say things. the effort to clean the gulf isn't even working. the oil is still lying under the ocean blanket and it's just big blanket of oil heading towards the currents and just killing of the species. while the poor die the rich get richer

With the first anniversary of the onset of the BP oil spill coming up next week, spill-weary Gulf natives have a fresh reminder of how the oil giant has devoted itself to studiously downplaying the damage of the disaster: A recently leaked body of internal company correspondence shows senior BP brass trying to spin scientific research produced by company-paid researchers in order to minimize the scale of the spill's destruction in the public mind.

The news doesn't exactly come as a shock to many in the Gulf region. After all, when the Mobile Press-Register first reported last summer that BP was contracting to hire a battery of coastal scientists, many theorized that some such initiative was afoot. And now the internal BP emails obtained by Greenpeace through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) appear to bear such worries out.

As The Guardian reports today, BP officials sought to tailor the findings of company-funded research. Last May, BP announced that it was ponying up $500 million to fund "an open research program studying the impact of the Deepwater Horizon incident." That mega-project is now known as the Gulf of Mexico Research Institute (GRI). And to judge by the emails released via Greenpeace, company leaders were deeply concerned with how to spin to the group's findings given they footed its research bills.

"Can we 'direct' GRI funding to a specific study (as we now see the governor's offices trying to do)," BP environmental official Russell Putt asked in a June 2010 email. "What influence do we have over the vessels/equipment driving the studies vs the questions?"

Another email written by a BP environmental officer, Karen Ragoonanan-Jalim, indicates that company officials met in Houma, Louisiana, to discuss how they might "steer the research" to best serve the oil company's interests, writing that officials discussed how "BP can influence this long-term research programme" to "undertake the studies we believe will be useful."

The emails also reveal dissension among U.S. government leaders over the spill, specifically over the White House's controversial, and ultimately disproved, claims that the "vast majority" of the spilled oil had vanished from the Gulf.

Reports the Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg:

The White House clashed with officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last summer when drafting the administration's account of what has happened to the spilled oil.

On 4 August, Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, demanded that the White House issue a correction after it claimed that the "vast majority" of BP oil was gone from the Gulf.

A few days earlier, Lisa Jackson, the head of the EPA, and her deputy, Bob Perciasepe, had also objected to the White House estimates of the amount of oil dispersed in the gulf. "These calculations are extremely rough estimates yet when they are put into the press, which we want to happen, they will take on a life of their own," Perciasepe wrote.

It should be noted that no evidence has yet surfaced to suggest that BP succeeded in compromising the integrity of the research carried out by any of the scientists working with the GCI.