Gulf Coast are sick from the effects of the oil gusher.

However, here is what Allen and the corporate media are not talking about — residents along the Gulf Coast are sick from the effects of the oil gusher.



"The harm dealt by this silent enemy is beginning to creep into the lives of those living and working in the Gulf. The problem has been lurking in the Gulf since the first days of the BP oil spill and now has the potential ignite a disaster unlike any this country has ever seen," reports Project Gulf Impact, an organization of citizen journalists who are doing what the corporate media refuses to do. "The residents of the Gulf of Mexico are entering a crisis whose scope cannot be calculated. Several symptoms have been reported, from subtle to severe: skin rashes and infections, upper respiratory burning, congestion and cough, headaches, nausea, vomiting, and neurological symptoms including short-term memory loss and coordination problems. These health problems, if acknowledged at all, are mis-diagnosed, buried, and mis-attributed."

In August, chemist Bob Naman tested the waters off Orange Beach, Alabama, and found they tested positive for the dangerous neurotoxin pesticide 2-butoxyethanol, the main ingredient of Corexit 9527A.

Months ago we were told by the government this version of Corexit was no longer in use.

Mr. Naman apparently made a mistake by making his findings public. He was subsequently threatened by BP. "I am not certain the reason or nature of the threats or whether they were financial or physical threats, but given the sudden rash of untimely deaths of those with damaging knowledge about BP I would not take any threats from BP lightly," Alexander Higgins wrote on August 24.

On September 1, Infowars.com carried a story about a swimming pool in Homosassa, Florida, testing positive for the Corexit 9527A marker 2-butoxyethanol. Samples were tested by Robert Naman, the thorn in BP's side. The story was ignored by the corporate media.

For BP and the Obama administration, scrubbing the oil gusher and its untold number of victims from the front page is more important than the health of people along the Gulf coast. The Democrats want the oil gusher to go away because of the political damage it will inflict on them during the mid-term elections this November. Republicans want it to go away because they are covering BP's back. Illness and misery will not be allowed to interrupt the political dog and pony show.

On September 18, 2001, then EPA administrator Christie Whitman announced the air at Ground Zero was safe to breathe. Experts estimate that as many as 40,000 people breathed noxious pollution, including dust, in the wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

But the afflicted — including heroic first responders — should not expect help from the government.

The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2009 would provide medical monitoring to those exposed to toxins, increase treatment at specialized centers for those afflicted by toxins and reopen a compensation fund to provide for the economic loss of victims. It was characterized as another Obama entitlement program by the GOP House leadership, who vowed to defeat the legislation.

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If the massive poisoning of the people of the Gulf is ever exposed, we can expect a similar response on the part of the government.

Dr. Michael Harbut, talks about the human effects of exposure to petroleum products.

This is a message and post from Pam Batson, Mobile Resident effected by BP Slick.

"This is good. 

Dr. Michael Harbut, professor of medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit  Everything he mentions is EXACTLY the symptoms we've seen exhibited in the Gulf region repeatedly since the spill. The other day I was talking with a guy who has ...walked the beach every day this summer and was complaining that he's lost most of the feeling in his feet. I hadn't heard about that, but Dr. Harbut addresses it here, that neuropathy and nerve damage are common. The other day, against my better judgement, I walked barefoot on what appeared to be a clean beach. Afterwards, the soles of my feet were orange. The dispersed oil is not always apparent, but it is there. No more barefoot walking on the beach!"

 

Curbside Consult, Gulf Oil Spill Health Hazards, Dr. Michael Harbut, Professor of Medicine, Wayne State University, August 5, 2010:

See here for Dr. Harbut's closing remarks and contact information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH9FgY...

For more information or to download the full 22 minute video, visit http://www.sciencecorps.org/gulf_oil_...

Hexane info starts at 6:50 in

Coastal Voices Part 03 Tonya Shell

Tonya Shell tells her story of getting sick from just breathing the air along the GULF COAST.
Tonya and her partner, like many others are leaving the Gulf Coast forever

Coastal Voices Part 02 Ashley Richards

Ashley Elizabeth Richards speaks out about getting sick while working for a contractor cleaning up the BP Slick.

Dr. Riki Ott Speaks Out at Orange Beach Public Health Forum

Dr. Riki Ott Speaks Out at Orange Beach Public Health Forum

October 11th, 2010 The Public Needs to Get Involved for the Truth to Come Out
by Glynn Wilson


ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — While the tourists were wandering around looking at the arts and crafts, listening to the music and munching on an array of grub Saturday at the National Shrimp Festival in Gulf Shores, another group of folks gathered at a church in Orange Beach to discuss what is apparently considered a taboo subject along the coast: the human health effects from the BP oil disaster.
The featured speaker was Dr. Riki Ott of Alaska, a recognized expert in chemical illnesses who has devoted her life to the cause since the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in 1989.
While everyone from local town officials to the British Petroleum corporation and its private contractors to the Coast Guard and even the Obama administration at the top blocked efforts for scientists to tell the public just how bad the Gulf oil disaster could be — and the mainstream, corporate media has largely ignored the human health effects story — Dr. Ott says she now has information that the U.S. Navy knew about the problems and even suspended routine training exercises in the Gulf.
“We’re getting contradictory information, which is incredibly annoying,” Dr. Ott said. “The public face says one thing, and behind the scenes there’s an entire other thing going on.”
So she’s helping to launch a Gulf-wide, community-based health survey to assess the health problems with short-term diagnosis and treatment and a long-term monitoring program, along with a public information campaign to get the word out to people.

Since coming to the Gulf Coast back in May, she has gathered information from Terribone Parish, Louisiana to the east of Apalachicola, Florida on what symptoms people are experiencing. They range from upper respiratory problems to headaches, dizziness, sore throat, hoarseness, ear and nose bleeds and skin rashes to upset stomach. The routes of exposure are inhalation and skin contact.
“Those are exactly the symptoms associated with crude oil. We were also told after the Exxon Valdez spill, ‘oh, don’t worry. The volatile organic compounds are all going to evaporate’,” she said. “No!”
There are some sectors of the population more at risk than others, Dr. Ott said. In studying toxicology, you learn that “dose plus the host makes the poison,” she said. So young children who breath more of the polluted mist coming off the Gulf faster than an adult and weigh less are more susceptible. Just as in child medicine the dose is different, if a child breaths in as much as an adult they will get sicker, faster. Pregnant women, the elderly and those with immune system and other health problems are also more at risk.
“These symptoms don’t seem to be going away,” she said, so medical doctors with no training in chemical illnesses typically diagnose food poisoning, heat stroke, staff infections and even scabies, even though infections and scabies are contagious, and the BP crud and related maladies are not. Scabies and staff infections can be passed from person to another, in other words, but there is no evidence for that with the oil and chemical related Gulf illnesses.
Dr. Ott has now talked to workers who were directly exposed to oil in the cleanup effort who have been prescribed antibiotics, some on their third or fourth round, she said, “and it is not clearing up.”
“Our bodies only have so many ways to say we’re sick. So cold and flu-like symptoms, headaches, these are all common things,” she said. “But they could indicate an uncommon causation, a chemical illness.”
She said people need to seek medical help, but they may have to educate their doctors about chemical illnesses since diagnoses is not an easy thing.
“If everybody turned purple because they were chemically exposed, then it would be easy to diagnose,” she said. “But it’s not like that.”
She has talked to pharmacists at CVS, Walgreens and even Winn Dixie pharmacies who say they are seeing an increase in these symptoms along the entire Gulf Coast. Some of the symptoms are acute, meaning they happen fast, and some are more chronic, meaning they develop over the long-term.
If people are misdiagnosed, as they were in Alaska after Valdez, Dr. Ott said, serious long-term problems can develop.
“After Valdez people were told they had a cold or the flu, and told to take Tylenol, to the point where the whole West Coast ran out of Tylenol. I’m still dealing with people who thought they had the Exxon Valdez Crud in 1989,” she said, but it’s “still going on 20 years later? Isn’t this a little long for a cold or the flu?”
The problem is, she said, that “the longer you leave this stuff in your body, the more havoc it can wreak.”
People along the coast who suffer any of these symptoms need to seek out the appropriate medical care and to get it properly treated, she said, which would include a physical detox program. People should also consider psychological treatment, since stress can worsen the symptoms.
On the health study, Dr. Ott said, it is important for the public to be involved as a “Gulf Coast community.”
“Let’s do it as a people, and not leave it all up to the federal government, because (based on their record of covering up the problems),” she said, “that is a really bad idea.”
The public should get involved by reporting any health symptoms to local, state and federal health agencies, and fill out the community-based health survey soon to be online at RikiOtt.com. People should also call the Deepwater Horizon Incident Joint Information Center and report health symptoms or dead or stressed wildlife at 713.323.1670.

Pilots Fly Over Environmental Horrors, Make Passengers Cry:

Pilots Fly Over Environmental Horrors, Make Passengers Cry: Mike Di Paola

By Mike Di Paola - Oct 11, 2010 11:01 PM CT

Pilot Tom Hutchings in the cockpit of his Cessna 182. "Flying is the most useful educational tool I know of when it comes to environmental issues," said Hutchings. 

Photographer: Mike Di Paola/Bloomberg

Mining operations seen from the Cessna piloted by Susan Lapis over Charleston, West Virginia. "People cry in my airplane all the time," says Lapis. Photographer: Mike Di Paola/Bloomberg

An aerial view of mountaintop removal mining near Charleston, West Virginia. SouthWings calculates the emissions produced by its planes, and neutralizes them with carbon offsets. Photographer: Mike Di Paola/Bloomberg

The effects of mountaintop removal mining are seen from the sky in Charleston, West Virginia. SouthWings has been flying media and policymakers over environmental disasters since 1996. Photographer: Mike Di Paola/Bloomberg

 

Photographer: Mike Di Paola/Bloomberg

 

Photographer John Wathen mans a video camera over Mobile Bay, Alabama. 

SouthWings pilots have made dozens of flights over the area since the April 20 BP oil disaster. 

After waiting out a clamorous thunderstorm at the Fairhope, Alabama, airport, the Cessna juddered through lingering clouds and turbulence over the Gulf of Mexico on the 104-mile flight to BP Plc’s sunken oil rig.

The sky was gray and I was green.
Then the astounding view from 3,000 feet took my mind off the plane’s sickening motion. It was 90 days after the oil disaster began on April 21. Fingerlike tentacles of glistening oil covered the surface of the sea, stretching to the horizon. We could smell the slick.
“Flying is the most useful educational tool I know of when it comes to environmental issues,” said pilot Tom Hutchings, who was as awed at the sight as I was. “Until you go up in the air and see things in the context of the whole place, you really don’t get it.”
(Even airplane views are limited, though. According to a University of Georgia study, 79 percent of the 200 million gallons of spilled oil is still underwater and will be for years.)
Hutchings is one of 37 volunteer pilots who donate their time and aircraft to SouthWings, a nonprofit conservation group that arranges flights all over southeastern U.S. for media, policy makers and community leaders. Aerial views expose the eye-popping scale of environmental catastrophes in ways that other perspectives cannot.
“When we get the news and the facts out on a situation, then people can act and make an informed decision,” said Hutchings, an environmental consultant when he isn’t flying. “Otherwise you’re just listening to the major media outlets, and we all know how much information a sound bite has.”
‘People Cry’
SouthWings pilots also usually spring for fuel. Hutchings’s Cessna 182 burned about $150 each time he flew to the rig and back, a trip he has made more than 25 times.
Susan Lapis, a pilot with SouthWings since its beginnings in 1996, has found that passengers can get emotional when they see how much damage human development has wrought.
“People cry in my airplane all the time,” she says. “Especially in West Virginia.” Last year she gave me a bird’s- eye view of the coal-mining operations around Charleston, where the devastation, a growing wasteland in the middle of otherwise verdant hills, is particularly jarring.
SouthWings offered to fly senate candidates now vying for the late Robert C. Byrd’s vacated seat over the mine sites, but it had no takers in advance of the state’s Aug. 28 primary. That’s too bad, because if policymakers ever grasped the true scope of the damage caused by the type of mining called mountaintop removal in this richly green state, it’s doubtful the practice would continue.
Positive Results
Occasionally pilots do see positive results of their work. Mark Miller, an organizer for the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition, flew with Lapis several times over the Shenandoah Mountains while spearheading the effort to make thousands of acres there Wilderness Areas, the most protective designation for federal lands and the most difficult to get passed.
Lapis was listening to the radio in March 2009 when the Virginia Ridge and Valley Act became law.
“That boy went to Congress and got his Wilderness Area,” says Lapis. “When I heard the news on the radio, I wept.”
A cynic might wonder, how is it that an environmental group -- which goes to great heights to expose the consequences of coal or oil consumption -- can make all these gas-guzzling Cessna flights with a clean, green conscience?
“It is something that comes up,” says SouthWings executive director Hume Davenport. “We’re burning fossil fuel while decrying the industries that produce it. We could be targeted as hypocrites.”
Carbon Offsets
Now SouthWings has effectively quashed that charge. Last year it calculated the emissions produced by all of its flights, then neutralized them by buying 45 tons of carbon offsets, an investment in projects that reduce the equivalent in carbon dioxide pollution elsewhere. This year they plan to go further and offset emissions generated by their office operations and ground travel.
I have seen some incredible -- and awful -- sights from the sky, thanks to SouthWings and its dedicated pilots. Every policymaker should get up there to see the big picture.
(Mike Di Paola writes on preservation and the environment for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Mike Di Paola at mdipaola@nyc.rr.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff in New York at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

America moves on from spill; Gulf coast feels abandoned

'People don't really care about the people who were affected'

1. Interactive

   

   BP stops the massive gusher

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Michelle Rolls-Thomas  /  AP

Chris Sherrill, owner of Staycations Beach Weddings, in the kitchen of Champs Place as he prepares for an event in Gulf Shores, Ala. Sherrill and other business owners along the Alabama Gulf Coast feel forgotten since the oil well has been capped and attention has been moved elsewhere.

By JAY REEVES

The Associated Press

updated 10/10/2010 9:05:10 AM ET 2010-10-10T13:05:10

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — About 800 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, Dave Edmonds is struggling to remind people about the BP oil spill.

There aren't many magazine covers with photos of oil-drenched birds now that BP has capped its massive gusher at the bottom of the sea. People aren't looking online for information about the historic spill like they were a few weeks ago.
So Edmonds, who lives on the Delaware coast, has started a nonprofit organization to keep the disaster on people's minds with a website and social networking campaign.


"Awareness has dropped. People don't really care about the people who were affected. They don't care about the fish life," said Edmonds, founder of Taking Back the Gulf.
For Gulf residents fighting for economic survival, a nation's short attention span is deeply unsettling, especially with oil still washing ashore. Yet it's unclear whether Americans are turning their attention elsewhere, or whether it's just the media that have.
Either way, people like Chef Chris Sherrill feel abandoned.
"It's amazing how quickly the American public forgot that this was one of the worst manmade disasters in U.S. history," he said. His wedding catering and event business in Gulf Shores, Ala., is teetering because few brides are still coming to the beach for weddings.
The slight isn't necessarily intentional. Walking with his girlfriend in a park in Des Moines, Iowa, Michael Gauthier said he wonders about the oil's lingering impact on the environment, and he fears for Gulf residents.
"It's not in your face every day so you forget about it. Who doesn't have bills to pay and work to go to? Who has time to think about what's going on in Louisiana?" said Gauthier, 26.
'Hello, there's plenty of oil'
What's going on is the continued arrival of oil washing ashore, although in lesser amounts than during the summer. Dire predictions of environmental Armageddon have yet to materialize, but there's also no consensus on how badly the ecosystem has suffered.
At first, no one could agree on how much oil was spilling into the Gulf; now there's disagreement over how much remains. A commission this week faulted Barack Obama's administration for multiple missteps, including an effort to block scientists from telling the public how bad the spill could be early on.
"If someone could say it will affect this, our shrimp are going to be poisoned for 10 years, people would think this is a bigger deal maybe," said Scott Peterson, 37, also of Des Moines.
Peterson's sentiment was echoed by Kathy Yoder, whose family works a farm in Washington, Maine. She said people may be dismissing the spill because the impacts don't seem as devastating as first predicted.
"What irritates me is people act like it's all gone because it's not floating on top of the water," she said. "I'm like, 'Hello, there's plenty of oil under the surface.'"


Recent research also raises the question of whether the spill is being overlooked outside the Gulf region, or if information on recent developments is just harder to come by. A Pew Research Center study found that only 1 percent of news coverage was dedicated to the spill last month, down from 22 percent during the height of the crisis.
However, a separate Pew survey found that 34 percent of the people responding to a poll in mid-September said they were still very interested in the spill — making it the top news item that week in terms of public interest. Participants were presented with news topics and asked how much they were following them.
But even if people say they're interested when asked directly, information from Google suggests that they're not searching as much for information about the spill online.
Interest wanes The term "Gulf oil spill" was a hot search on Google for weeks, peaking in mid-May as a sense of doom built around the fate of coastal towns, marshes and beaches. Soon, photos were all over the media of oiled marshlands and crude washing in with the surf on beaches.
Conditions on some parts of the coast improved in July, and Google searches had decreased dramatically by late that month, when BP finally capped the well and oil stopped flowing into the deep-blue waters off the coast of Louisiana.
Even more Web users lost interest through August despite the occasional blip, and people now enter in the Gulf oil spill search terms about as often as they did in April before the horrendous rig explosion and unstopped gusher grabbed the coast by the throat. Far more common today are searches for information about the economy, actress Lindsay Lohan or the University of Alabama's top-ranked football team.
One place where interest remains high is Cordova, Alaska. The northern fishing community of 2,200 was devastated after the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound in 1989, and Gulf residents have visited to learn from survivors of the Alaska spill.
"I think like all things media-related, when you see it often enough, it's pushed to the back of your mind," said Rochelle van den Broek, executive director of Cordova District Fishermen United. "But here, it's in our minds a little bit more than other places because it's a subject so close to people."
In Louisiana, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser became the face of the oil spill during the summer, meeting with Obama and conducting countless media interviews. The parish still sends out regular news releases with photos of fresh oil, almost begging someone to notice.
Nungesser said it's no accident that America has spill amnesia. He faults BP commercials for portraying the region as being healthier than it really is, for focusing more on successful aspects of the cleanup than the havoc the gusher created.
"What's frustrating to me is that they're obviously setting the stage for pulling out," Nungesser said.

BP has said it's in for the long haul, and Chef Sherrill said the company needs to be. He has creditors all over the country, and he regularly must explain to them that he can't pay his bills because the spill dried up business and there's simply no money.
"It should be a crime what is happening down here," Sherrill said.