Assessment Of Health Risks After An Oil Spill

Assessment Of Health Risks After An Oil Spill.
This Tuesday and Wednesday, a high-ranking troupe of top-notch government advisors is meeting to outline and prevent potential health risks from the Gulf oil spill - and find ways to devalue them. The workshop, convened by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) at the request of the US Department of Health and Human Services, will not spring any formal recommendations, but is intended to spur debate on the developing spill. "We know that there are several contaminations.

We know that there are several groups of people - workers, volunteers, settle living in the area," said Dr Maureen Lichtveld, a panel member and professor and moderator of the department of environmental health sciences at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans. "We're prevalent to discuss what the opportunities are for exposure and what the implicit short- and long-term health effects are.

That's the essence of the workshop, to look at what we know and what are the gaps in science. The noted point is that we are convening, that we are convening so quickly and that we're convening locally". The meeting, being held on Day 64 and Day 65 of the still-unfolding disaster, is taking home in New Orleans and will also cover community members.

High on the agenda: discussions of who is most at risk from the oil spill, which started when BP's Deepwater Horizon fiddle exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, manslaughter 11 workers. The spill has already greatly outdistanced the 1989 Exxon Valdez cropper in magnitude.

So "Volunteers will be at the highest risk," one panel member, Paul Lioy of the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey and Rutgers University, stated at the conference. He was referring in general to the 17000 US National Guard members who are being deployed to domestic with the clean-up effort.