[THS] Thousands of People Along the Gulf Coast Suffer BP Crud

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

Thousands of People Along the Gulf Coast Suffer 'BP Crud'

The Untold Story of Human Health Effects From BP's Oil Disaster
http://blog.locustfork.net/2010/09/thousands-of-people-along-the-gulf-coast-suffer-
bp-crud/

Editor's Note: The Washington Post was given an opportunity for first, exclusive rights
to publish this story today, but took a pass "because of the complicated nature of this
story and our concerns that it's too early to judge the real health effects." Due to the
time sensitive nature of this story, and because of tonight's community health
meeting in Orange Beach, we cannot hold it any longer for traditional news outlets. A
special thanks to Spot.us for partial funding to cover travel expenses for reporting on
this story.

by Glynn Wilson

ORANGE BEACH, Ala. - Wherever disaster strikes, there's always an associated crud.
There was the Exxon Valdez Crud. The Nine Eleven Crud. The Katrina Cough, and
then the TVA coal ash cough.

Now, along the entire coast of the Gulf of Mexico, there is the BP Crud, afflicting
workers and the general population from Louisiana to Florida.

When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, Robin
Young, a 47-year-old director of guest services for a property management company
in Orange Beach, Alabama, was gearing up for what promised to be the best tourist
season on the coast in years. From the city of New Orleans to the Florida panhandle,
communities were finally starting to feel like they were recovering from the
devastation left in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Ivan.

Since suffering a debilitating bout of what locals are calling the "BP Crud," however,
like thousands of other people along the coast due to their exposure to the oil and
chemical dispersants, she is now part of a growing community of activists along the
coast who are worried about their health.

Just a few days after BP's oil made landfall along the Alabama Gulf Coast in June, Ms.
Young's symptoms started with "a fiery, burning sore throat," she said. Then came
the horrible, constant cough, followed by an achy feeling much like a severe flu virus
- and a lethargy that kept her in bed for two weeks solid. Her memory started playing
tricks on her, and her motor skills and even hand-to-eye coordination went south.

She started communicating with other sick folks over the Internet, and attending
local meetings with corporate and government officials. At one meeting early on, she
asked for a show of hands in a room of maybe 400 people to see how many had
suffered symptoms similar to hers.

"Half the people in the room raised their hands," she said in an interview at her
cottage right next to the Intercoastal Waterway, which was polluted with oil and
chemicals at the height of the disaster.

Clearly, this was not some isolated event unrelated to the oil rig blowout.
Her new friends, who soon started a nonprofit group called Guardians of the Gulf,
tried to find a local doctor to help them. After having no luck, they eventually found
an out of state toxicologist and a doctor who knew enough about a new area of
occupational and environmental health to order blood tests.

They found Dr. Michael R. Harbut, a clinical professor of Internal Medicine and
director of the Environmental Cancer Program at Wayne State University's Karmanos
Cancer Institute, board certified in Occupational and Environmental Medicine. And
they found Metametrix, a lab to test their blood.

What they found in the blood tests was a stew of toxic chemicals directly associated
with oil and gas production and the chemical dispersant Corexit, including
ethylbenzene, xylenehigh and high levels of hexane, a hydrocarbon chiefly obtained
by the refining of crude oil.

The long-term toxicity of hexane in humans is extensive peripheral nervous system
failure. The initial symptoms are tingling and cramps in the arms and legs, followed
by general muscular weakness. In severe cases, skeletal muscles atrophy and those
exposed suffer a loss of coordination and vision problems, the very symptoms Ms.
Young reported.

Town officials and even local doctors have tried to silence her and others who raise
the health issue, worried that if news got out, it could hurt the local economy even
more. But a group of local pharmacists started keeping diaries of people coming in
with similar symptoms.

"There's a core group of them that finally said, 'Holy Cow,' something's going on,"
she said. "They started listening to what we were saying. But we still couldn't get a
lot of help. We couldn't get help from the local doctors because they didn't know
what to do."

Early on, Ms. Young invited a crew from Bio-Cascade, air-pollution specialists out of
New Jersey and Boston, to come down and test the air. She put them up in a house
right on the beach.

On the third day John Vallier of Bio-Cascade woke up with a sore throat. He put the
air monitoring machine on the deck and within 15 minutes it showed 110 parts per
million of Volatile Organic Compounds in the air. The crew quickly packed and said
they would help from outside the vicinity of the bad air coming off the Gulf. It was
striking how scared they were and how fast they got out of town, Ms. Young said,
while EPA was downplaying the threat coming from its own air monitoring stations.

Another member of her group who suffered similar symptoms but does not want to
be identified by name called the local schools and confirmed that there were an
unusual number of children out sick with what was diagnosed as "strep throat" and a
"stomach virus," at the end of summer and long before flu season is supposed to
start.

Another woman, Robyn Hill of Foley, actually passed out while working for a BP
contractor cleaning up the beach. When she was taken to the hospital by ambulance,
the doctor tried to make her sign a form saying she suffered a heat stroke. She
refused, and has now joined the cause to save the Gulf.

"It really fired us up," Ms Young said.

So they found a chemist in Mobile to test the water, Bob Naman, an analytical
chemist with nearly thirty years of experience. They have tracked the oil, natural gas
and Corexit. One sample right off Dauphin Island was so full of methane that it blew
up in the lab's test tube.

Meanwhile, Ms. Young and her friends are now being told they need a high
resolution scan of their lungs, brain, liver and kidneys.

"They've also told us that in five to 10 years - they don't have a time frame, they're
just guessing," she said, "that we could come down with some godawful form of
cancer."

That's exactly what happened in the area around Prince Williams Sound, Alaska, after
the Exxon Valdez ran aground in the spring of 1989 and leaked about 11 million
gallons of crude into the water, according to Dr. Riki Ott, a recognized expert with a
Ph.D. in marine toxicology and a specialty in oil pollution.

Dr. Ott's information is so sought after in four of the five Gulf states most affected by
the largest and worst environmental disaster in U.S. history that she has practically
moved to the Gulf Coast. I finally caught up with her in a hotel room on my iPhone
from Gulf Shores.

After spending the past four months working to try to get a handle on the scope of
the problem, and getting sick herself, she has heard similar stories first-hand now
from people ranging from Terrebonne Parish Louisiana to Apalachicola Florida.

"What struck me when I first started hearing these stories was how similar the
symptoms were to what happened after the Exxon Valdez oil spill," she said.

The human health effects of that spill were mostly confined to sick workers, she
indicated, because that area of Alaska is not heavily populated like the Gulf Coast.
"I expected the vessel of opportunity workers to get sick because they were given
hard hats instead of respirators just like our guys were. So it really didn't surprise me
in early May when I heard pretty much identical health symptoms," she said.
Dizziness, sore throat, headache, nausea, burning eyes, and eventually skin rashes
resistant to treatment with antibiotics.

"What convinced me that we may have a really big problem here," she said, is when
she heard similar stories at community forums from people not working directly in the
oil and chemical tainted water, marshes and sand, and when she talked to
pharmacists who reported seeing a huge increase in respiratory illnesses and bad skin rashes.

"Now that the children are back in school, there's a series of 'strep throat," she said.
"It's the same symptoms, the blisters in the throat, the rashes I'd heard about all
summer."

There is a new area of occupational and environmental medicine covering chemical
related illnesses, and the symptoms literally mimic flu-like symptoms. Dr. Ott is
launching a Gulf-wide health survey along with coastal non-profit groups including
the Louisiana Bayoukeeper and Ultimate Civics, a project of Earth Island Institute.
The groups are also holding community health forums and opening health centers to
try to get a handle on the scope of the problem.

But there are serious gaps in the law that allows workers to be exempted from
coverage by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and even
under the existing workers compensation regime. Under the U.S. Department of
Labor, OSHA does not recognize chemical illnesses, Dr. Ott said, although it is
recognized under the American Disabilities Act.

"We've got a safety net with two big holes in it, and the workers are falling through
those holes. It's time to close those holes, and not only for the workers, but for the
public," she said. "What's going on in the Gulf is to pretend that we can have this
release of 200 million plus gallons of oil, 2 million plus gallons of toxic chemicals, and
it's not going to have any effect? In a highly populated area? I mean, come on!"