“I have critically high levels of chemicals in my body,” 33-year-old Steven Aguinaga of Hazlehurst, Mississippi told Al Jazeera. “Yesterday I went to see another doctor to get my blood test results and the nurse said she didn’t know how I even got there.”
Aguinaga and his close friend Merrick Vallian went swimming at Fort Walton Beach, Florida, in July 2010.
“I swam underwater, then found I had orange slick stuff all over me,” Aguinaga said. “At that time I had no knowledge of what dispersants were, but within a few hours, we were drained of energy and not feeling good. I’ve been extremely sick ever since.”
BP’s oil disaster last summer gushed at least 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, causing the largest accidental marine oil spill in history – and the largest environmental disaster in US history. Compounding the problem, BP has admitted to using at least 1.9 million gallons toxic dispersants, including one chemical that has been banned in the UK.
According to chemist Bob Naman, these chemicals create an even more toxic substance when mixed with crude oil. Naman, who works at the Analytical Chemical Testing Lab in Mobile, Alabama, has been carrying out studies to search for the chemical markers of the dispersants BP used to both sink and break up its oil.
Poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from this toxic mix are making people sick, Naman said. PAHs contain compounds that have been identified as carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic.
“The dispersants are being added to the water and are causing chemical compounds to become water soluble, which is then given off into the air, so it is coming down as rain, in addition to being in the water and beaches of these areas of the Gulf,” Naman told Al Jazeera.
Why isn’t the U.S. press following up on this?
#29, good analogy. And by the same token some people can drive a car and some people cannot go ten feet in one without killing themselves or someone else. Therefore by your logic all cars should be banned if even ONE person is harmed by one. Please! I’m sure every person who comes down with cancer down there for the next thousand years is going to blame it on the government and BP, because why else would they come down with cancer? Genetics? Pre-disposed conditions such as smoking that they already had? Other factors in their life? Cancer-causing viruses? No no no, the ONLY reason they can possibly come down with cancer according to your logic is this oil spill, and the government and BP are completely at fault. To this I say: poppycock!
And for you other people who just automatically believe everything these scaremonger “environmentalists” say, and disbelieve everything the government and companies say just because they are doing the speaking, your logic is a little out of whack. Yes, some people were probably made sick by these chemicals, I don’t deny that. But to just automatically assume that BP and the government are lying, were at fault to begin with, in a conspiracy with each other before the disaster even occurred, etc, is just ludicrous.