ABSTRACT
The response to the 2010 Macondo oil well blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico used significant quantities of dispersants. The materials that comprise the oil dispersant, COREXIT 9500® present minimal toxicities. Risk to spill responders would be reduced through the use of personal protective equipment. At the time, oil spill dispersants were not well understood outside of the oil spill response industry. The apparent data gap resulted in a rush to generate data on these materials without consideration of the existing toxicity data used by the consumer product industry. A review of new in vitro and in vivo toxicology studies indicated numerous examples where the study design was not clearly defined, leading to difficulties in the evaluation of study quality and uncertain relevance of the studies to human health risk assessment. The lack of transparent communication of the results to the scientific investigators and the public has led to a mistrust of oil dispersants, due to a misunderstanding of their potential hazards and risks to human health. This paper will examine the hazardous properties of individual dispersant constituents and technological considerations of published toxicology studies of oil spill dispersants. This summary will objectively evaluate oil dispersant ingredients for human health risk assessments and provide guidance to future scientific investigators on high quality study designs.
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