Workers who cleaned up the nation’s greatest oil disaster were 60% more likely to develop asthma or suffer asthma symptoms one to three years after the spill, according to the Gulf Long-term Follow-up Study (GuLF STUDY).
This continuing National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) research is the biggest to examine the health of Deepwater Horizon oil disaster responders.
“This is the first study to correlate particular oil spill chemicals to respiratory disorders,” said Dale Sandler, Ph.D., head of the NIEHS Epidemiology Branch and GuLF STUDY principal researcher. If you were a gulf oil spill worker with asthma-like symptoms, tell your doctor.
The researchers reviewed data from 19,018 oil spill response and cleanup employees and 5,585 non-workers who got safety training. Nobody had asthma before the spill. Non-workers were a comparative group without exposure.
Researchers evaluated oil spill chemical exposures. They looked at the association between asthma or asthma-related symptoms and cleaning employees’ occupations and total hydrocarbon exposure. Researchers also looked at benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, and n-hexane (collectively known as BTEX-H).
The Clean Air Act classifies these compounds as dangerous air pollutants, and the GuLF STUDY links them to health impacts.
Researchers observed that exposure to BTEX-H compounds and the combination enhanced asthma risk.
The more a worker was exposed to crude oil chemicals, including total hydrocarbons, individual BTEX-H chemicals, and the BTEX-H mixture, the more likely they were to have asthma symptoms, said Kaitlyn Lawrence, Ph.D., of the NIEHS Epidemiology Branch and lead author of the Environmental International study. “Exposure levels varied based on clean-up duties and length of employment,” she said.
Administrative assistance, water sampling, cleaning up crude oil from a ship or seashore craft, decontaminating equipment or animals. (GuLF STUDY’s website lists all participant occupations).
983 (5%) cleanup employees reported asthma and symptoms, but just 196 (3%) non-workers did. Heavy equipment operators, maintainers, and refuelers had the most asthma.
For this research, asthma is defined as a doctor’s diagnosis or, for never-smokers, self-reported wheezing all or most of the time.
We included non-doctor verified asthma cases since the GuLF STUDY population is socioeconomically poor and fewer than half report access to medical care, said Sandler.
This study’s definition of asthma is based on one used effectively in previous large epidemiological studies.
The GuLF STUDY continues to track 33,000 initial participants to assess health outcomes and solve public health issues. Visit https://gulfstudy.nih.gov/en/index.html for more details.
NIH, NIEHS funded this study (Z01 ES 102945).
NIEHS is part of the National Institutes of Health and funds research on environmental health consequences. Visit www.niehs.nih.gov for more information about NIEHS or environmental health.
NIH’s mission: NIH has 27 Institutes and Centers and is part of HHS. NIH conducts and supports fundamental, clinical, and translational medical research on common and uncommon illnesses. Visit www.nih.gov for information about NIH programmes.