“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?
I love seafood, but people look at me like I’m from Mars when I ask them (restaurants, grocery store) where they get their seafood. And even worse when I say no thanks.
Yeah, Gulf seafood is a little scary nowadays. It’s a damn shame.
HHopper asked: Why isn’t the U.S. press following up on this?
Probably because the media has not figured out a way to link this back to Bush and Cheney.
Where is Dallas when we need him?
Why isn’t the U.S. press following up on this? Follow the money.
The U.S. Press is owned by big corporations. This kind of news is not friendly to big corporations. Therefore, it is not reported by the U.S. Press. It takes the foreign press to get the real story.
Why? Because it doesn’t concern the middle east.
Hurray for freedom of the press!
..too bad US press is owned, sold it’s freedoms to big-everything.
Is it any wonder people don’t want to pay for news anymore?
“Why isn’t the U.S. press following up on this?”
Is that rhetorical?
#6 You got that right dadeo… freedom of the press applies only to those who own a press. And now, it’s overwhelmingly the big corporations.
Finally! I just KNEW that there had to be consequences for dumping all off those dispersents yet I have heard nothing. Here’s hoping those suffering can find an independent outlet to make it public.
Re: “Why isn’t the U.S. press following up on this”?
It doesn’t involve Charlie Sheen.
While you’re here doing real news, al Jazeera, could you please find out why no-one was ever charged with the negligent homicide of 11 Americans, as a result of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and fire?
Thank you!
#10 Agreed.
Sadly, the American sheeple have forgotten the oil disaster as ancient history involving oil, the Mexican ocean and birds.
…Back to sucking on the oil tit and Walmart
“Why isn’t the U.S. press following up on this”?
Because the Yankee press are total lapdogs to their corporate masters as mentioned previously in this thread.
Barrels (millions of them) of toxic chemicals have been dispersed off your Gulf Coast to stew magical Allah smiting compounds which will pollute a major infidel food source for years to come, while also raining down toxins all over the south and midwest.
Good luck with that.
🙂
#11–Forces==weren’t the survivors paid millions of dollars in compensation? As true, the “motives” can be argued several different ways.
So Al Jeereza reports ONE case? Last year, 10’s of thousands of cases of Swine Flu were ridiculed as made up hysteria.
Show me the studies NOT the opinion of one otherwise qualified expert with only ONE supposed confirming case.
Do I “believe” the Gulf is polluted and that we know what the long term effects on the ecosystem including hoomans is/will be?==No.
Do I love seafood?==Yes.
Do I follow McCullough’s example?==No. Anyone ignorant enough to buy seafood from the Gulf is evil enough to lie about where they buy their seafood. I’m probably being poisoned anyway, but what you gonna do?
Wine stops becoming alcoholic at 13% when the active life form dies from/in its own waste products. And so are we.
Gosh–horrible conflicting compound statement. I apologize. Is gulf polluted?==Yes. Do we know the effects?==No.
Stick around. Mississippi River sediment will bury it. In a couple of million years.
Why isn’t the U.S. press following up on this?
Corporate capitalism.
Do you really think the lame media is going to make that kind of attack on their Messiah?
National Oil Spill Commission urges research on toxicity of dispersants
Published: Saturday, January 15, 2011, 3:00 PM
http://tinyurl.com/47emnqc
BTW, the BP pollution pales in comparison to what flows into the Gulf from the Mississippi EVERY DAY.
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?
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.