The teams of relief workers currently working in the Gulf may face a host of oil-related health problems. Studies show that people who have prolonged contact with oil and oil products may experience negative physical and psychological side effects.

Oil spill clean-up brings workers and volunteers into close contact with chemicals that are known to be hazardous to human health. As we deal with the oil spill in the Gulf, it helps to brush up on history.

For the rest of the summary, check out the full-length article at Grist.org.

Editor’s note: Article by Gina Solomon. Originally published by our friends at Grist.org. Grist is a media organization that has been dishing out environmental news and commentary with a humorous twist since 1999. Be sure to visit them and say hi, and follow Grist on Twitter, too!

Image: Photo Courtesy of U.S. Army

Blame Thomas Edison (or Heinrich Göbel if you must split hairs). Ever since the invention of the lightbulb, humans have stopped spending the hours after sunset huddled in bed, terrified of marauders and werewolves and bad night air. Instead we’ve been tripping the artificial light fantastic – staying late at work, going out to movie theaters, nightclubs, and bars, and obsessively checking Facebook. As a result, the average night’s sleep for Westerners has gone from roughly nine hours to seven over the past hundred years.

And that’s why you’re going to die, at least according to a series of studies recently published in academic journal Sleep. The combined studies were culled from Europe, Asia, and North America and monitored more than one-and-a-half million subjects. Turns out sleeping less than six hours a night increases your chance of premature death by 12 percent.

No problem, you say? You’ll just chug half a bottle of Nyquil and up the shut-eye quotient? Well, that’ll kill you just as dead, according to some more science. The body’s natural response to the flow of night and day – the circadian rhythm – has been evolutionarily been fine-tuned over millions of years. When the sun goes down and the body stops receiving external light, it starts producing melatonin (a sleep-inducing chemical), turns off responses to stress, and performs other healing tasks.

One of the more prominent links to poor sleep habits is constant exposure to blue LEDs. You know, laptops, TVs, iPads; those little gadgets grafted onto your skin throughout the day. Traitors! I always knew that my computer would kill me one day – I just hoped it would be in an epic, 2001-style outer-space-showdown, not a coward’s attack while I’m sleepy and defenseless.

Image: Alyssa L. Miller

America runs on coal. It creates half of our electricity. And the unclean technology producing this source may be killing our children, grandchildren and the future unborn, not to mention our natural environment.

Is the fed sensing the urgency to limit the damage from this source we depend upon?

Not according to three environmental groups looking for clean coal technology. They are planning to sue the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for being blatantly lax in limiting toxic discharges from power plants that threaten the health of local communities exposed daily to the pollutants.

According to Planet Shifter, the federal government is 26 years behind setting restrictions on the discharges which contaminate ground and surface waters and threaten aquatic life. Apparently, the EPA should have limited coal ash discharges to meet its own requirements for annual environmental reviews.

Back in December when a coal ash spill occurred at the Tennessee Kingston Fossil Plant, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson promised to issue regulations by the end of the year for nearly 600 coal plants with on-site coal ash storage ponds or landfills.

But the three groups planning to sue: the Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Integrity Project argue “the EPA need to stop kicking the can down the road and set a date for the regulation.”

There is evidence that these coal plants discharge millions of pounds of toxic pollutants every year. According to the report, in  Kingston, alone, more than 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash spilled from a coal-ash holding pond last December when a earthen wall ruptured. The ash contains elevated levels of arsenic, selenium and lead, among other toxic substances.

In a 60 Minutes investigation on harmful waste by-products from coal, it was revealed that the tremendous amount we burn for electricity every year generates 130 million tons of waste. They even interviewed coal barons who have become rich off coal, who admitted being responsible for those smoke stacks that pump out 100-million tons of carbon dioxide every year.

Most of the waste emitted from power stations  is coal ash which is dangerous to humans and other living things. Environmental scientists tell us that the concentrations of mercury, arsenic, lead and other toxic metals are considerably higher in coal ash than in ordinary soil.

When properly disposed of  in dry, lined impoundments, coal ash is considered to be safe. But observers say it is often dumped into wet ponds (nearly 500 of them in the U.S.)  and in those cases the ash could pose health risks to the nearby communities.

Images: Tennessee Valley Authority, Earth Observatory, NASA