Hospital admissions related to chemical spill in W.Virginia doubled even after water declared safe
Despite recent declarations that the water in West Virginia is now safe to use, hospital admissions related to the Kanawha Valley chemical spill have doubled over the last week.
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Complicating the situation is that some areas already had their “do not use” bans lifted before new tests revealed chemical levels above the one-part-per-million standard mandated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
To make matters worse, the standards set by the CDC are not based off Crude MCHM, but rather a pure form of MCHM. Since the Crude MCHM mixture is actually composed of a combination of seven total ingredients, it’s possible that the safety tests don’t adequately account for the potential danger of the other chemicals.
“If crude MCHM is truly what leaked, it’s possible that we don’t even know which of this ‘cocktail’ is most harmful. We could have set a threshold based on the wrong one. We may be testing the wrong one,” Evan Hansen, president of Morgantown-based Downstream Strategies, told Think Progress.
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http://rt.com/usa/west-virginia-chemical-spill-water-911/
Chemical-related hospital admissions rise
January 18, 2014
CHARLESTON, W.Va. --Even as the last official water restrictions were lifted Saturday, more people were getting sick from exposure to the chemical that contaminated the Kanawha Valley's drinking water, according to numbers provided by a government official.
As of Saturday, a total of 411 patients had been treated at 10 hospitals for reported chemical exposure since Jan. 9, according to Allison Adler, a spokeswoman for the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources. Twenty patients had been admitted to four hospitals. None of them are still in the hospital and none of them were in critical condition, Adler said.
Those numbers have increased significantly since Thursday, when the DHHR said 317 had been treated and 14 had been hospitalized.
The West Virginia Poison Center had received 2,302 calls about the chemical leak by Saturday evening, Adler said. Of those, 1,862 were human-related, 98 were animal-related and the rest were requests for information only.
Chemical-related hospital admissions rise
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http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201401180073
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