Long-Term Study of Gulf Oil Spill Health Effects Needed

27 September 2010

Gulf cleanup workers in close contact with crude oil, smoke fumes and dispersants have reported feeling ill.

This month, the British oil company BP issued a controversial report on the cause of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico four months ago.

Regardless of who was at fault, the release of an estimated four million barrels of oil had a major environmental impact. But there has been relatively little scientific study of the long-term human health effect of this kind of event.

In a world dependent on petroleum fuels, oil spills seem inevitable. However, Gina Solomon of the University of California San Francisco Medical School says the medical consequences don't get sufficient attention from scientists.

"Of the 35 or so major oil spills that have occurred in recent decades," says Solomon, "there's only some health study from eight of those spills, and most of those are just contemporaneous study."

Meaning there was no long-term study of the health effects.

One exception was a 2002 spill off the coast of Spain, where scientists documented DNA damage among volunteers doing cleanup along the beach.

Crude oil is full of toxic materials, and when oil from a leaking underwater well hits the surface, many of those materials can enter the air near where cleanup workers are breathing.