ed by the EPA as being a safe hell to breathe in though early on in the disaster it was reported that the EPA warned BP not to use it.

Over 40% of adults living within ten miles of the coast said they have experienced direct exposure to the oil spill or clean-up effort. Within this group, nearly 40% reported physical symptoms of skin irritations and respiratory problems, which they attributed to the oil spill.

Colombia University

Someone or a group of some ones should probably be shot for what they have done to the southern United States with Corexit for it is doubtful that any medical protocol, no matter how brilliantly designed, is going to be able to protect the animals, plants and people in a wide region around the Gulf of Mexico. Corexit is an agent that has been shown to break down lipid membranes, which cover and protect human skin and cover each and every human cell and absolutely no one on the planet has every worked with this kind of toxicity before.

Over one-third of parents report that their children have experienced either physical symptoms or mental health distress as a consequence of the oil spill.

Colombia University

Human skin and cell membranes are composed of a thin layer of lipids and Corexit, by nature, breaks down these organized barriers into smaller individual molecules allowing the barrier to become permeable to pathogens. The skin irritation could be caused by prolonged exposure to these chemicals and could break down the ability of the body to fight off infection and on a cellular level interfere with the health and respiration of the cells.

My prediction is that we will be dealing with the impacts of this spill for several decades to come and it will outlive me. I won't be here to see the recovery.

Dr. Ed Cake Biological Oceanographer

The fact that it can cause rupture of red blood cells indicates that it can severely damage cell membranes. Cell membranes consist of a mixture of lipids (about 30%), proteins (about 50%), cholesterol, and some carbohydrates. A key portion of the membrane is the lipid bilayer that consists of phospholipids. Any disruption of this lipid bilayer is likely to cause dysfunction of the membrane that lead to membrane rupture (as is known to be the case with red blood cells and corexit), increased cell mebrane permeability (allowing toxins to penetrate the cell), and disrupted cell-cell communication causing overall organism disfunction and possible death. Since corexit has been designed to disrupt and disperse lipids/oils, exposure of the body's cells to this chemical through inhalation, skin absorption, or ingestion is likely to cause severe organ disfunction.

We are beginning to get reports as far as 800 miles north of the coast in Missouri of wide-scale damage to plant life that can only be coming from one source — dispersed airborne oil. Oil toxicity is one hugely damning thing but oil mixed and dispersed with Corexit is quite another.

Dispersants have never been applied on this scale, leaving environmental scientists guessing about the consequences.

Popular Science.

There is great concern that the dispersant BP used so widely will do more harm than the oil itself that leaked into the Gulf. The corporate monster British Petroleum chose to "cover their trail" by releasing disturbingly excessive amounts of Corexit onto the area of the spill. By dispersing the oil, BP and the Americans who own it hoped to reduce the scope of the devastation, at least in terms of diminishing their financial liabilities since the amount of measurable oil they can be fined for is thereby reduced.

The EPA asked BP to stop using Corexit, which is banned in 18 countries due to its toxicity, but the oil transnational refused.

The Coast Guard routinely approved BP requests to use thousands of gallons of the chemical per day to break up the oil in the Gulf, despite a federal directive to use the dispersant rarely, the investigators said. The Coast Guard approved 74 waivers over a 48-day period after the Environmental Protection Agency order. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., released a letter Saturday that said instead of complying with the EPA restriction, "BP often carpet-bombed the ocean with these chemicals and the Coast Guard allowed them to do it."

Back at the end of June Yobie Benjamin, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, was reporting about a mysterious disease that has stricken crops in Mississippi. "It seems like damage brought by the oil gusher has spread way beyond the ocean, coastal areas and beaches. Collateral damage now appears to include agricultural damage far into inland Mississippi." The disease has caused widespread damage to plants from weeds to farmed organic and conventionally grown crops.

[800 miles from the Gulf Coast we are seeing this.]

On July 20th I got a letter from a woman living in Missouri who wanted to let me know that the wild vines that are on her property were dying and look like rusted lace. She started noticing these around June 22nd and they continue to die especially after a rain. Also now other leaves are dying and seem to have holes and brown spots in them. Leaves from hickory trees, poison ivy and basically almost all other vegetation seem to have this. She has lived on this property for 14 years and has never seen anything like this. She felt sure that this is from the oil spill and the chemicals used. "I really do feel that it is from the rain."

More than a third report children with new rashes or breathing problems, or who are nervous, fearful or "very sad" since the spill began. And even though the gusher of oil has been stanched, almost a quarter of residents still fear that they will have to move.

National Center for Disaster Preparedness

By the beginning of August cries have started, "Where is all the oil?" It seems they have only made the devastation much worse with the use of 2 million gallons of dispersant. No one knows how light or severe the long-term effects will be but it's beginning to look like we can assume the worst even up to and including the possibility of impacting the Gulf currents, which will have great impacts on the weather in the North Atlantic and Europe. It makes sense that the currents would be altered by changing the viscosity of the water and we do have the first reports of the stalling of the Gulf Loop Current.

Dr. Gianluigi Zangari, an Italian physicist at the Frascati National Laboratories in Italy notes that the effects of this stall have begun to spread to the Gulf Stream. This is because the Loop Current is a crucial element of the Gulf Stream itself and why it is commonly referred to as the "main engine" of the Stream. If worst case scenarios come to pass hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, will be wishing certain people, governmental organizations and corporations never existed.

Researchers at Tulane say it appears they've detected a Corexit fingerprint in the orange blobs found lodged in the bodies of tiny blue crab larvae collected from marshes that stretch from Texas to Florida so we can begin to assume that the toxic blueprint of this particular oil disaster will be enormous; the effects will be measured for many years or decades to come. Corexit is banned in the United Kingdom but was approved for use in the Gulf of Mexico by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Oil dispersants trap oil and hold it in globules in the water instead of allowing it to rise to the surface where it can evaporate or be more easily collected. By keeping the oil away from the surface and therefore away from the shore, BP is minimizing its costs of cleaning up oil that reaches the shore and minimizing the amount of the fines that can be imposed upon them.

Chemist Kim Anderson of Oregon State University in Corvallis heads a team tracking how much of the worst toxins in the oil — organic chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — have been dumped in the water by the spill. They'll be measured at four sites off the coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Earlier samples from Louisiana alone showed that by June 7, concentrations of the toxic chemicals had risen 40 times higher than levels on May 1, although the water looked clear of oil.

Keith Ouchley, the biologist who leads the Nature Conservancy in Louisiana said, "What we don't know are the biological impacts that occur as that oil is dispersed through the deep water columns under the ocean's surface. We don't know what it is doing or affecting today or in the future. There is very little experience with this scale of spill at these depths in such a biologically productive system as this."

The greatest concern, added Ouchley, is what impact the undersea oil concentrations could have on the billions of tiny larval fish, shrimp and other organisms that are at the bottom of the whole marine food chain — and we may not know that for many years. And it's the same for the health effects on adults and the future for many children in the northern Gulf.

No one in the Gulf is calculating the damage or the threat accurately for residents there are already under heavy attack from mercury-polluting smokestacks. The government has never admitted the true dangers of this heavy metal, which is a potent neurotoxin. Add the exposure to a large percentage of the local population due to mercury-containing dental amalgam, and now it's almost flu season meaning the government is going to want to swoop into the area with its mercury-containing vaccines.

One 33-year-old woman said that upon seeking medical advice at a clinic, she was told she had scabies. Hours later, she was told by an area hospital that she had a staph infection. The woman was treated with a shot of penicillin and Elimite cream, a topical agent for the treatment of scabies mite infestations, and an oral antibiotic. In addition to the lesions, the woman reported aching bones, weight loss, stomach pains, inflammation in her leg and sties developing in her eyes. No consideration is given to toxin exposures from the Corexit mixed with the oil.

The active ingredient of the toxic chemical dispersant, which is up to 60% by volume, being sprayed by BP to fight the Gulf oil spill is a neurotoxin pesticide that is acutely toxic to both human and aquatic life, causes cancer, causes damage to internal organs such as the liver and kidneys simply by absorbing it through the skin and may cause reproductive side effects.

In fact the neurotoxin pesticide that is lethal to 50% of life in concentrations as little as 2.6 parts per million has been banned for use in the UK since 1998 because it failed the UK's "Rocky shore test" which assures that the dispersant does not cause a "significant deleterious ecological change" — or to put that in laymen's terms, it can kill off the entire food chain. But since the American government feels threatened by its own people, and takes great pride in treating us cruelly while lying about so many things, it comes as no surprise that they would create the greatest gas chamber the world has ever known for its own people.

Corexit has earned the highest EPA warning label for toxicity, which means the effects of the toxic chemicals to the eye are corrosive resulting in irreversible destruction of ocular tissue and other tissue with corneal involvement along with burning that can persist for more than 21 days. Effects to human skin are corrosive resulting in tissue destruction into the dermis and/or scarring. Yet you will be astonished to see at the end of this chapter that the company who makes Corexit says it's no more toxic than chocolate or ice cream. I kid you not!

Corexit was widely used after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and according to a literature review performed by the group, the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, Corexit was later linked with widespread long-lasting health impacts in people including respiratory, nervous system, liver, kidney and blood disorders. While writing Sound Truth and Corporate Myths, Dr. Riki Ott uncovered Exxon's clinical data showing 6,722 workers, out of a total of 11,000, reported upper respiratory illnesses. In 2003, a Yale grad student, Annie O'Neill, conducted a pilot study that showed roughly one-third of these workers continued to suffer symptoms of chemical exposure.

Cleanup workers were the first to experience dizziness, fainting, nausea, nosebleeds, vomiting, coughing, headaches, stomach upset, and difficulty breathing, compounded by heat, fatigue, hydrocarbon smell, and combined toxicity of oil and dispersants.

Besides other toxins, crude oil contains benzene (which even in small amounts is associated with leukemia), Hodgkin's Lymphoma, other serious blood and immune system diseases, ventricular fibrillation, congestive gastritis, toxic gastritis, pyloric stenosis, myalgia, kidney damage, skin irritation and burns, swelling and edema, vascular congestion in the brain, and lethal central nervous system depression among others, depending on length and degree of exposure.

The EPA's safe level is 4 parts per billion (ppb), yet Gulf levels reach or top 3,000 in some areas, and has been smelled and "felt" hundreds of miles away, meaning residents inhaling fumes are ingesting dangerous toxins and raising their risk for serious future health problems, some potentially lethal.

Long-term exposure to benzene, ethylbenzene, xylene, toluene and other solvents may cause infertility, low-birth-weight babies, miscarriages, decreased cognitive function, psychomotor coordination problems, weakened immunity, and increased risk of depression, insomnia, certain cancers, and other diseases.

Even though "lab tech" Dr. David Horsup, VP of research and development for Nalco, the company that makes Corexit, says there's no danger of the dispersant making its way into the food chain, there seems to be some disagreement:

From the company's own Material Safety Data Sheet:

Where concentrations in air may exceed the limits given in this section, the use of a half-face filter mask or air-supplied breathing apparatus is recommended. A suitable filter material depends on the amount and type of chemicals being handled. Do not get in eyes, on skin, on clothing. Do not take internally. Avoid breathing vapor. Use with adequate ventilation. In case of contact with eyes, rinse immediately with plenty of water and seek medical advice. After contact with skin, wash immediately with plenty of soap and water. Wear suitable protective clothing. Can cause chemical pneumonia if aspirated into lungs following ingestion. Repeated or prolonged exposure may irritate the respiratory tract.

Sept. 2010

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