“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?
After looking again, some of the best investigative footage I found was done by jamescfox, a documentarian. His youtube channel is now “This channel is no longer available because the user closed their account. “
Why was BP given the first and only oil drilling permit after the moratorium?
This repuke president is in cahoots with the oil cabal. Did I get it right?
Two friends go swimming in the Gulf, both get goop on them. After several hours on the beach and swimming they are both drained and don’t feel good. One says he’s been sick ever since. We must assume the other is just fine, so I must assume the other wants money from someone.
“Poly aromatic hydrocarbons are making people sick” is stated without any documentation of any sort. We are just supposed to believe that millions of people are being made sick right now without any evidence yes or no. I’ll pass, thank you. I guess the oil spill was supposed to just lie there, exposed to the air for millions of years, giving off its own fumes which we KNOW are toxic, instead of trying proven methods of dispersing the oil and getting it off the surface where nature can work on it.
I am not a scientist, but I can see an attempt at scaring the public and an effort at making money off of something that probably cannot be proven one way or the other so lets go after the government and an oil company.
lol AlJezzara is your news source.
“orange slick stuff” — heh, that’s what my dish soap looks like, so this must be the dispersant BP used. And everyone knows that those benzene-ring chemicals are in dish soap; it says so right here on the ingredient label… PAH – 90% by weight.
And so many of you fools actually bought in to this story. Do you people even know that PAH are seriously regulated under EPA. And by seriously, I mean EPA wants to know how many millgrams of this shit a company dumps into the air. And we are supposed to believe that they allowed BP to dump tons of this stuff into the ocean as a dispersant?
#24 and #25
Thank you, BP public relations company employees!
We are so honored you located this blog post and took the time to use DU to spread more of BP’s corporate bullshit around the Internet.
If you’re looking for help, there are several bloggers around here who apparently work full time, for free, doing exactly what you’re doing.
Perhaps you could recruit them and get them out of here when you fuck off, which you are encouraged to do at the first opportunity.
Have a nice day!
#26
I am far from happy with the way the oil spill has been handled. yet, I too see the problems with over reacting. IF this is an issue then there would be more documentation and, logically, more people complaining of being ill.
No, we don’t know all the effects of the oil dispersant(s) used and I have no doubt many aren’t pretty. That doesn’t mean we should all run for the nearest cliff just because someone said they were not feeling well.
Convince us with evidence, not innuendo.
#26 — Guess what, I don’t give a damn about BP.
But I worked in the environmental field for 20 years and I have had my fill of the bullshit being spread around by environmental weenies like you. Idiots without a lick of sense or evidence, claiming such and such a company is killing them. And of course, people believe this shit because everyone knows COMPANIES ARE EVIL.
My company spent 5 years doing studies and providing evidence that we were not killing an “endangered species.” The species was the Fat Whirl Pond Snail. Some biologist from a local university found this snail in a stream leaving our plant, then he claimed that that was the only location on the planet where a Fat Whirl Pond Snail could be found. Five years of studies and $200,000 spent proving to the state and feds that we were not killing the poor animal, only to learn that Fat Whirl Ponds Snails were not endangered at all, but were ubiquitous to the region.
Of course we told the regulators that the snail wasn’t endangered, but we were an EVIL industry and, therefore, had to by lying. It wasn’t until we got them off of their fat asses and LOOKED for themselves that they finally believed us. All of this because an environmental ‘expert’ made a bullshit accusation.
#24 Yes, you are obviously not a scientist, since you seem to think that the same dose of a toxin will have the same effect on different people. Let me enlighten you with a tiny slice of toxicology.
One of the basic rubrics or measures for toxicity is called the LD50. That stands for the Lethal Dose for 50% of a standard population. So, if 100 people are give that dose of a deadly toxin, 50 will die, and 50 will live. Some in that 50 may never even have symptoms of being dosed. Even controlling for body weight, people have very different biochemistry and sensitivities to different toxins.
#28 Wow, that’s a sucky story. Reminds me of the scientist who was distributing bobcat hair all over the place to exaggerate their range and get areas shut off to development. That story made all sorts of press, and the scientist was roundly excoriated after the fraud came to light, surely your story got some press. I’d like to read up more, do you have a link?
What Oil Spill, there was an oil spill.
#30 — No we didn’t get press. Industry never wins in press wars, ever. Best to keep them out of it if your can and just keep bending over for the regulators.
#33 Well, you just had bad PR. BP, for instance, has Reuters as it’s PR firm.
http://www.floridaoilspilllaw.com/four-dead-dolphins-visibly-oiled-reuters-story-straight-reports-showed-signs-oil-contamination
I wonder how much that cost.
Crap, shoulda shortened it. http://goo.gl/uOKUV
#30 — And I’ll tell you another thing I learned from experience: Industry can never use scientific evidence to sway public opinion in their favor.
A rancher grazed his cattle on company property. (He sold the property to us 40 years ago, but he kept the grazing rights.) Then one year, two of his cattle died under mysterious circumstances and he claimed that we were responsible. Not wanting to get into a legal battle, we agreed to pay him $20,000 in damages.
Two years later, eight of his cows died under circumstances that looked like grass tetany poisoning. This time we let him take us to court. The rancher hired a vet professor from that same local university, who then conducted autopsies on the cattle. Then only thing unusual that this ‘expert’ discovered was that the copper level was a bit low in the cattle’s blood. From this he argued that our plant had contaminated the ground with molybdenum, which had been observed to cause copper deficiency in cattle. (Off course, a simple mineral block would have solved this problem, if the rancher had bothered to set them out.)
Copper deficiency is a chronic condition, meaning the harmful effects are observed over months. All of these cows died within 12 hours of each other.
We argued that the cause was grass tetany, which is an acute reaction cattle can get from eating spring grass low in magnesium. The cattle showed classic symptoms of grass tetany prior to death. Of course, the ‘expert’ never bothered to check for grass tetany because — he had never seen a case of it before.
Who won in court: The rancher showed a video to the jury of his cattle staggering around and thrashing on the ground (again, grass tetany symptoms) and the jury awarded him $6 million.
#27 Mr. Fusion
Somehow, you don’t sound like yourself these days. Happy upcoming Birthday, by the way.
It’s not my job to do research – for you or anyone else. You want me to supply a list of 27 links about mass marine death in the Gulf and hundreds of documented complaints of ill health?
Where would I get those links, since the media seems to have utterly forgotten about this apparently insignificant event? Talk about Alzheimer’s…
If you read what this sudden influx of new DU bloggers have posted on this topic, you already know they have a research department, whose sole responsibility is to obfuscate and outright lie to save some corporations some money. It’s what they do.
I don’t believe it’s even open to question. Just read the Comments here.
We could re-title this post “Suddenly, Experts Appear”. Oddly enough, they’re all giving us corporate spin, talking back and forth with each other. Why, I wonder?
Surely real scientists have actual work to do, other than shilling for BP for free on a crummy blog!
Predictions:
1) This will get worse
2) Nothing will be done
#36 said, “If you read what this sudden influx of new DU bloggers have posted on this topic, you already know they have a research department, whose sole responsibility is to obfuscate and outright lie to save some corporations some money. It’s what they do.”
For your information, I have been posting to this blog for years. I rarely post anymore, because you can’t teach “know-it-alls” anything.
And your post also proved my point: nothing anyone says that runs counter to your “industry is evil” religion could possibly penetrate your thick skull.
No need for industry in this country — we can all just go on welfare.
#38 Smith
On the Internet, no-one knows you’re a shill until they read what you wrote.
I’m not going to bother pointing out it’s pretty obvious to people with a brain that pumping 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf is probably a bad thing, just on the face of it.
I also won’t mention the 1.9 million gallons of toxic dispersant, added to the mix, most likely didn’t help anything except BP’s bottom line.
I won’t even mention the eleven Americans that BP murdered. No-one else is.
If you’re certain no harm was done to the Gulf itself, the creatures who live in the Gulf and the people who live along the Gulf, who am I to question you, a fucking self-proclaimed expert?
You obviously have a very low opinion of the intelligence of people reading this blog – or you’re just another shill for BP. People can decide for themselves.
The Internet is lousy with you guys lately, like maggots on an old corpse.
Interesting how each side wants to use a single instance of whatever to characterize the entire situation. And reality isn’t so simple.
Hoomans really are one dimensional.