The dispersants being used to clean up the Deepwater Horizon oil spill may be less toxic than initially thought, released yesterday.
The EPA tested and a small coastal fish called the for their response to the dispersants. Of eight dispersants tested, six were classified as “slightly toxic” and two as “practically” non-toxic.
Corexit 9500A, the only dispersant available in large enough quantities to be used in the Gulf, . The report also states that dispersants do not seem to disrupt hormones, .
More reports will follow: the EPA says it will next look at how sea animals respond to a mixture of dispersant and crude oil.
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Data you can believe
, a toxicologist at the University of Maryland in Solomons and co-author of , told Â鶹´«Ã½ she would like the EPA to also test how dispersants in the water affect sea animals in the long term, including their rates of survival, growth, and reproduction.
Previous safety tests have been accused of having wildly inconsistent results and inadequate control measures. “Now you can at least believe this data,” says Mitchelmore, who has been a vocal critic of the earlier tests.
Earlier this week, EPA administrator defended her decision to allow the use of dispersants. “So far the data show we haven’t done any damage, and actually we’ve helped with dispersion,” , a daily paper in New Orleans, Louisiana, that has been running .
Suspicion of BP, meanwhile, remains high. Earlier this week, at a TED conference specially convened to discuss , , an ecologist and president of conservation organisation the , said that he remains sceptical about the use of dispersants to clean up the oil spill. Safina, , sees BP’s use of dispersants as a ploy to “to limit the visibility of the leak for public relations purposes”.
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