"Little danger from tarballs" and Corexit 9500 is "a slight hazard." [View All]

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:wtf:


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37520064/ns/disaster_in_the_gulf/

Skeptical public fears oil-spill health issues
Experts say medical risks will be mild, but many people just don't believe it

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For nearly seven weeks, local and national health officials have stressed that most medical risks likely will be mild and confined to workers exposed to oil and chemical dispersants at the source of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

“The human toxicity of oil, it’s pretty low,” said LuAnn White, a toxicologist and director of the Tulane Center for Applied Environmental Health in New Orleans, La. “It looks awful, it’s coating the birds, but the toxicity of those compounds is very low.”

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Last week, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that tarballs now washing up on Florida beaches pose little danger and that exposure to small amounts of oil and dispersants is not harmful.


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Corexit 9500, a dispersant being used in such vast amounts, is rated as a 1 on the HMIS scale, or a slight hazard, according to the product's Material Safety Data Sheet, which warns against contact with eyes, skin or lungs.

Critics such as the coalition Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families charge that the dispersants have not been adequately tested and that the ingredients in the products have not been fully disclosed, obscuring potential health problems.

The worst health effects of oil exposure occur early and then diminish over time, White said. Volatile compounds in the oil, which are most toxic, evaporate quickly into the air. By the time oil reaches beaches, and becomes so-called "weathered oil," it has lost most of its toxicity. By the time it shows up as tarballs, the risk is even lower, she said.

Studies of dispersants have focused more on the effect on aquatic life than human life, White said. Though little is known about the long-term effects of the substance, she said an analogy would be the difference between people being exposed to dish soap residue after doing dishes versus dumping the stuff into a fish tank.

"It's not going to hurt you, but it might kill your fish," she said.

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