page_title: GuLF Study
section_title: Focus
hierarchical_section_title: GuLF Study / Study details / Focus
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of the Gulf of Mexico showing New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola. Created to illustrate biography of Stirling.
context_page_description: The GuLF Study, or Gulf Long-term Follow-up Study, is a five-year research project examining the human-health consequences of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010. The spill followed an explosion on a drilling rig leased by BP, the British oil company, and led to the release of over four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, 48 miles off the coast of Louisiana in the United States.
  The study was set up in June that year by the United States Department of Health and Human Services. It is being conducted by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health, and aims to recruit 55,000 of the 150,000 workers who volunteered or were employed to help clean up the spill. It is led by Dale Sandler, head of the NIEHS's epidemiology branch.
context_section_description: The areas affected are Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. The study aims to track 55,000 workers for at least five years. The workers will have been involved in a variety of tasks, such as oil burning, skimming, booming, as well as cleaning up animals, equipment and the shoreline, resulting in different levels of exposure to contaminants. The study has also recruited, as a control group, workers who completed the clean-up safety training, but who in the end did not take part in the clean-up itself.
  The researchers will examine the workers' exposure to volatile organic compounds (VOCs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and dispersants, using monitoring data gathered during the clean-up. Around 20,000 of the workers will be visited at home, and blood, hair, urine and toenail samples will be collected to look for biomarkers, such as DNA adducts and chromosome damage; lung-function tests will be carried out, and dust samples will be collected from their homes.
  Researchers will look for respiratory conditions, cancers, hematological outcomes, and neuro-behavioral or mental-health problems, and for any job losses, and financial or domestic disruption, the spill may have caused. Questionnaires ask workers about their health at the time of the spill, exposure to oil or dispersant, and lifestyle factors that, as the study said, "might confound associations between exposures and health." By January 2013 researchers had conducted 32,000 telephone interviews, including 800 interviews in Spanish and over 1,000 in Vietnamese, and 9,967 home visits.
caption: Over four million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico.
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