9-11 cleanup redux: respirators and shrinks, anyone?

Who’s protecting those valiant humans who are trying to protect us from the Gulf oil spill? Granted, the flora and fauna in the ocean have been the first to get smacked by this miserable environmental disaster. But the humans, particularly those whose occupation is either being part of the response and clean up effort, or close enough to the scene to be wiped out by the spill, deserve attention too. That’s one goal of the bloggers over at the Pump Handle (http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphandle/), cleverly named to honor John Snow’s unpopular insistence on taking the handle off of a public well pump during an 1850’s epidemic of cholera in London in order to finally cut off the infection’s source. So is learning from past mistakes, such as the long term health issues experienced by those in New York who worked on the World Trade Center site.

The blog is managed by Celeste Monforton and Liz Borkowski, both public health professionals in the Department of Environmental Health at George Washington University with academic research interests in occupational health issues (full disclosure: I'm predisposed to like Celeste, whose family rents our beach house every summer). Both are both are frequent critics of OSHA, and indeed most of the blog content doesn’t hesitate to mix information on problems with strong opinions about root causes and culprits.

The blog’s postings continue to cover a variety of topics, but a number of recent entries, mostly from Liz as well as guest blogger Elizabeth Grossman, have centered on the health problems now cropping up among oil spill responders. OSHA’s outdated standards and dubious air sampling data come in for clear criticism. Ms. Grossman explores the relationship between workers’ respiratory and gastrointestinal symptoms (some serious enough for hospitalization), and breathing oil-saturated air or being in proximity to controlled oil burns. Eileen Senn, an experienced industrial hygienist, makes a good case is made for distributing respirators to workers universally, contrasting her analysis with disturbing quotes from official and corporate sources about reasons for not doing so.

The longer term impact on residents’ mental health, particularly given folks in the area have already been beaten up by Katrina, has also gotten good discussion, with plenty of mention about the lack of mental health professionals being on the scene to date. This is the only place I have seen any mention of another sad factor: over a third of Louisiana’s commercial fishermen in the region are Vietnamese, many recent immigrants that send money to families still back in Vietnam and now on the front lines of stress. Overall, the Pump Handle gets kudos for drawing attention to these occupational and public health issues.