Heartbreaking News -

My heart 'sank' when I heard this

Yesterday I was visiting with someone I don't usually talk to, and came up with my usual, "What did you do in 1989 during the Exxon Valdez oil spill cleanup?"

Turns out he was on a barge that delivered supplies of all kinds, mostly to the beach workers. That would be the 'bioremediation' experiment using 1,000 young MEN ... mostly college age kids.

He said they didn't realize how strong the Inipol EAP 22 was and that the workers were having blood in urine and had red bloodshot eyes.

My heart sank. From what I've learned about this product, it causes hemolytic anemia (that's the blood in urine) and with that strong an exposure, it is very unlikely that any of these young men would be alive today, 16 years after the fact.

The synonym for hemolysis is hemoglobinuria. I looked it up and learned some more things, but the most distressing was that the average people live is 10.3 years. Without exception, this is a rule that has proven true. So, anyone still alive today ... is on 'borrowed time' Then, too, that would depend on how much exposure. Some people died in that very year, with easy jobs, like transporting people and equipment in their fishing boats. (I suspect exposure to either ethylene oxide &/or 2-butoxyethanol) Same as for the 'gulf war syndrome' vets. They had exposure to 2-butoxyethanol AND diethylene glycol monobutyl ether

I next talked to a Union worker from those days. They said the Union was offering free blood tests to those in the Union (either at this time, or for those retiring). There seemed to be little trust for the Union. Who wants this info? Why? What will they do with it? Who would get a copy?

Of course, I know that they don't find the harm of 2-butoxyethanol unless they were to check some extra things.

PS

Ah ha ... I just remembered what the blood shot eyes would mean. This is the primary route of exposure to this 2-butoxyethanol chemical: through the eye membranes. These workers would have had an extreme, very excessive amount of exposure to this chemical for the eyes to be blood shot like this

(And remember, they were inexperienced, stranded at sea - working long hours for 2 weeks straight with no cell phones and no computers to contact their families.)

Even without this sign the eyes can burn and hurt and give someone way too much exposure. ... like this lady who worked for the box dept of Home Depot in Sugarland, TX. She is now having kidney failure and expected to die at 35 years of age. Doctors are stumped as to what is the matter with her.
12-19-03 Daughter: "Yes, I remember all to well when my eyes started burning like there was hot pokers in them. It coincided with a VERY nasty stomach bug...vomiting, the runs...it was miserable. The day I got sick I had been rolling around in a very nasty store cleaning up the mess. (box account in Sugar Land, TX) That night I was so sick...took me 2 days to get the energy up to drag myself to the doctor's office & threw up all over it for him to tell me I had the flu."

Margaret: "These 'flu' like symptoms are also the signs of having too much chemical exposure of some kind."

My question, "Now, what were you using to clean up?"

I hope she didn't use 409 Cleaner, it's a mini Corexit!

This is a real eye opener.

Would you elaborate on 409 and any other household chemical threats?

the door here too.

n/t

i got into it and was SICK from anything petroleum or had Formaldehyde.. pollyester..,shampoo, soap..ink, you name it.. i had hives on at least 25% of my body for 6 years.. I was lucky, i got over it.

It was a chemical in the adhesive backing of carpets.. it actually closed down the EPA building, declared a sick building, everybody in it got sick, and it took them about 4 years to close it down.. i think they lost about 30% of their employees onto long term workmans comp disability.

I saw a program where people got into it 8 or 10 years later and cut a piece of carpet one foot square.. they put it in a cage of mice and they were all dead but one within 24 hours.

when I was a kid.. We used to play in the "fog" behind the trucks.. We had no glass in our windows, so everything in the house had a greasy residue on it..Hand to wipe everything down twice a day, including the bars in my baby brother's crib.. He cried every afternoon after the fogger came and had skin lesions when he was a baby..

I have heard that DDT stays in your tissues forever.. I probably have more DDT in me than a dead cockroach :(

You are a heroine. The chemical companies poison us all.Slowly.

It's in our air water land..

Never trust a corporation they are sociopathic.
Ever wonder why we all are sick and have no insurance and the FDA is a sham? It's a CULL people..and I am serious.

The rulerrs we let liuve in luxurious bubbles do not see us as equals.

The see us as expendable tools they destroy us for fun..

AND profit. Damn.

meat or other animal products. Dioxin, artificial growth hormones, hundreds of antibiotics and more ............ it's a nasty, nasty list.

It's organic veggies for this family. Dioxin on a bun? No thanks.

DIOXIN:
http://www.ejnet.org/dioxin/

to clean that spill from Exxon. They took it to Homer 80 miles away and left it on the docks. It was never used, the booms and stuff. BUT! it was on the books so they could claim they were on the clean up. Corporations lie. They are the scum of the earth. This is sad news but not surprising for those of us up here.

you have to scroll down the list in the upper right "All Product Catagories".. it lists home, yard, pets ..etc.. if you click "all".. you wont get much you have to be specific. they list the strength in %, at the top are folder tabs with the MSDS etc.

http://hpd.nlm.nih.gov/ingredients.htm

the top rectangle has a vast amount of information.. just click on the underlined words..

On the plus side, what a handy site.

http://householdproducts.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/household/brands?tbl=chem&id=45&query=2-butoxyethanol&prodcat=all

http://householdproducts.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/household/brands?tbl=chem&id=28

What is a Corexit?

What are those chemicals that those young men were being exposed to? What produces these chemicals? Why did a woman in Home Depot have this kind of exposure?

I'm sorry, it seems that is something very basic that I am missing. But I would appreciate being enlightened.

It contains a chemical called 2-butoxyethanol, which is also called ethylene glycol monobutyl ether.

http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp118.html will tell you all about this chemical. It is very dangerous. Hemolytic anemia is just one of the diseases it causes.

Chemicals like the Corexit family and the Inipol family were used to help oil-eating bacteria break down the crude oil being carried by the Exxon Valdez. Unfortunately, they also break down the workers. (And it turns out that the best way to remediate an oil spill is to boom it off but do nothing else; nature is capable of denaturing all of that oil anyway.)

Why a Home Depot employee would have this kind of exposure: 2-butoxyethanol is found in hundreds of home-care products. Formula 409 is a big one--it is very popular because it works, but it's not the only household chemical that contains it. Krud Kutter probably has it, Goo Gone I know has it, the special "citrus" cleaners we sell have it (because it's cheaper than d-limonene, apparently), even paints have it. And it's not like you can go to Lowe's, Target or a supermarket and find safer products; the entire mass-marketer spectrum sells the same things. When cleaning supplies come in, they're shipped in one of two ways: on a slipsheet direct from the manufacturer, or on a pallet from the distribution center. When you get a slipsheet of...oh, let's say Formula 409...you'll get 32 cases of 409. They are sitting on a thin sheet of cardboard (the slipsheet) and are wrapped with plastic stretch wrap. You pick it out of the truck with your slipsheet machine, deposit it on an empty pallet, and haul the pallet out to the floor. If you get a pallet from the DC, you'll find a mix of products--we might need five cases of bleach, ten of Brasso, two of laundry soap and enough liquid hand soap to fill out the skid. Okay, back to the point: the three ways you could come into contact with 2-butoxyethanol in a Home Depot are:

1) breaking some or all of the bottles in a shipping unit. Dropping a case off a ladder is the most common way this happens. Fortunately, this doesn't happen very often.
2) bottles leaking--some of those products arrive in wet boxes, and you can just smell the chemicals contained therein. This happens a lot.
3) using the products to clean the store.

Of the three choices, the last is most probable.

I'm on my store's safety team, and one of the things we can do is to select products for use by the associates. We used Orange Glo to clean price labels off beams for many years. I stopped that, not because of the 2-butoxyethanol in it, but because it has other "petroleum distillates" in it and, as poorly as this product actually works to dissolve the glue on these labels, you're standing around huffing these petroleum distillates for far too long. Now we use WD-40. Yes, it is pure petroleum distillate. However, it cleans the beams very quickly so you're inhaling hydrocarbons for much less time. (Plus, it gives the beams just a very light oiling. If you rub the beams down well, new price tags will stick...but they're easier to get off in the future and keeps crud from sticking to the beams, which keeps them cleaner.)

So far I've had 3 blood transfusions since October, and the Doctors still don't know what is causing it.

I will throw away the 409 right now!

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