A handbook of environmental toxicology: human disorders and ecotoxicology.

Chapter 20 (Page no: 299)

Crude oil pollution I. Deepwater Horizon contamination: human health effects and health risk assessments, a case study.

On 20 April 2010 the Deepwater Horizon mobile oil exploration platform experienced a devastating accident that led to the largest marine oil spill in history. This event led to concern about health risk due to oil-related chemical exposures in oil spill response personnel, including workers and volunteers, and community members in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Thousands of individuals were involved in clean-up operations and millions were potentially at risk due to contamination of seafood. Occupational exposure monitoring and sensory and chemical analysis of seafood were conducted in order to determine the potential for exposure to workers and community members via inhalation or dietary exposure routes. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employed air monitoring to determine if community members were likely to be exposed to oil-associated volatile organic compounds. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) developed fishery closure and re-opening guidelines designed to minimize potential dietary exposures. The occupational monitoring determined that clean-up workers experienced exposures that were below accepted occupational exposure limits and there was minimal exposure potential to community members associated with volatile compound that were released from the crude oil. The potential for dietary exposure to oil-related chemicals via seafood consumption was minimal. The Deepwater Horizon event provided an opportunity to evaluate the current regulatory and health risk assessment framework, which is primarily designed to deal with individual chemicals, as it applies to a complex scenario that involved mixtures of chemicals, non-chemical agents (such as psychological stress) and physical agents (such as heat). Reconciling the complexity of this event with the current regulatory health risk assessment process proved to be a difficult endeavour and highlighted many of the limitations of the current approach.

>>
>> Return to Search Results