Source: 8 years after BP oil spill, thousands of medical claims still not paid | NOLA.com
This article states that British Petroleum has”also agreed to pay for a 21-year medical monitoring program for clean-up workers, and $105 million to operate community-based health programs in several coastal locations for several years after the spill, as a provision of the settlement.” However, according to the news report BP Oil Spill: Criminal Negligence, Dr Michael Robichaux opened a clinic out of his home 2 years after the spill to treat over 100 cleanup workers and the shared symptoms he observed shocked him. “Patient from all over LA, MS, AL, Fl all had identical problems, very bizarre problems, things that I have never seen before.” These problems include anything from memory loss to respiratory disorders.
Here is a list of health symptoms associated with BP crude and dispersants
Headaches
Difficulty breathing
Vomiting
Asthma attacks
Chemical pneumonia
Damage to liver, lungs, kidneys
Damage to respiratory system
neurological/nervous system damage
Blood disorders
Blood cancer
According to court documents: Case 2:10-md-02179-CJB-SS DOCUMENT 6273-10 Filed: April 18, 2012 Page 14 of 15, Table 3: Chronic Specified Physical Conditions, the conditions covered by the first settlement are easily treatable and cost effective such as a runny nose and facial pressure and vastly different than those observed by Dr. Robichaux. He said, “They came up with a list of illnesses that were at very best chicken shit (for lack of a better expression).”
Wilma Subra, an award winning toxicologist, has tested the blood tissue of countless cleanup workers was stunned by what she saw as well. She said, “This was 2010 and this was absolutely unacceptable for workers to be exposed and made ill in 2010 in the workplace environment.”
According to Ms. Subra, “My estimate along the coastal areas is hundreds of thousands of people are ill as a result of their exposure. If you take the health symptoms and you look at the health symptoms in the settlement, they don’t match. So as a result of this, the people who are being made very ill by being exposed are not part of the settlement. The other piece to this is BP was allowed to put together a large package to provide health care in LA, MS, and AL. Primary healthcare. Now, LA and MS are at the bottom of the list of health care, primary health care, and we don’t doubt that. But BP was allowed to put money into primary health care and the criteria excluded the health symptoms that were the result of the exposure to crude.”
“Most of the data that BP generated or that BP contractors or university people that were under contract with BP, most of that data (air monitoring samples) is not available. So we can’t look at it and see, we have seen a little bit of the data and they are trying to argue the toxicity is way below health standards. But when you look at the samples that non-BP associated researchers did, it is demonstrating that it is in the toxicity range.”