Hesperian Health Guides
Oil and Community Health
HealthWiki > A Community Guide to Environmental Health > Chapter 22: Oil, Illness, and Human Rights > Oil and Community Health
Contents
Natural gas also causes health problems
Burning natural gas produces less carbon dioxide (a cause of global warming) and other pollutants than burning oil. But drilling for natural gas is similar to oil drilling, and it brings many of the same social problems. Almost everything that is true about oil in this chapter is true of natural gas as well.
Communities affected by oil organize a health study
In 1992, a group of health promoters in the Amazon jungle in Ecuador studied the way oil drilling was affecting local communities. They knew oil companies were destroying their land, but there was little understanding about how the oil affected people’s health. So the health promoters began to collect information in their towns and villages.
The health study took a lot of work and a lot of time. When they began, the health promoters did not know what they would learn. They tell their story in their own words throughout this chapter.
For thousands of years this region has been home to indigenous people. In our part of the Amazon jungle live many different peoples: Shuar-Achuar, Runa, Quichua, Huaorani, Siona-Secoya, and Cofan. Each of these cultures has its own language and art, and its own vision of reality. Before modern times, all of these tribes lived in harmony with nature. Then this harmony was broken. If we want to understand what is happening to us, we have to look at our history.
This was the beginning of breaking the balance between our ancestors and nature. First, the Spanish searched our lands for gold and silver. Our ancestors were forced to work as slaves digging gold and silver out of the earth. Then the English came. Instead of gold, they wanted rubber. They made slaves of us to take rubber from our lands. After this, the oil companies came. They did the same thing.
We know the oil companies are destroying our health. This is why our health promoters decided to study the pollution and how it affects us. We want to work together for a better economic, political, and cultural situation.
The health promoters learned that people in oil-polluted communities have more sickness than in unpolluted communities. Women in these communities suffer from many miscarriages. Children suffer from malnutrition, and often die at an early age. Many people have skin diseases that do not go away. (Learn more about the health problems caused by oil.)
This is just some of what they learned. After their study, they produced a book called Cultures Bathed in Oil so other people could learn from the work they had done.
Our team was made up of 6 people: 3 health promoters (2 who worked in communities and 1 who worked in a health laboratory), and 3 health technicians (a doctor, a biochemist, and a medical technician).
Here are the steps we followed to do our study, so you can do the same thing:
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We gathered information.
We collected information about the type of oil exploitation in our area, the chemicals used, and the health effects of these chemicals. We learned that the chemicals were known to cause miscarriages, birth defects, cancer, and other illnesses. We also learned that people get these illnesses by drinking water polluted with these chemicals. -
We chose which communities we would study.
We chose 7 communities that had water polluted because of oil development and extraction. Choosing polluted sites was easy, because nearly every community in our area is polluted by oil wells, waste ponds, or pumping stations. We also chose 3 communities that had no oil activity, but that were similar in all other ways to the first 7 communities. -
We collected medical histories from people in these communities.
We collected information from 4 years past to see what illnesses were most common from one year to the next. We learned that many, many people suffered from accidents and illness. Until we collected this information, we did not know so many of us were sick! -
We contacted scientists to help us... but they would not help.
We went to a local center of health studies and asked for a class in popular research methods. They were interested at first, but in the end they would not help us. Then we asked for help from the medical school nearby, and they would not help us either. The students there recommended that we study the chemicals in our drinking water. Since this was expensive, they suggested we try to raise money in other countries.
Nobody wanted to help us do the study. So we decided to do the study ourselves. -
We organized a meeting of people from all the communities in our area.
We explained why we wanted to do this study and asked if the communities were prepared to help. At the end of the meeting, everyone voted to do it. We organized a committee including health promoters, people from different communities, and people with knowledge of how chemicals affect people and the environment, to carry out the study and analyze the results. -
We made a work plan.
We planned to take 5 months to do the study. We would go to a different community every 15 days and stay for 3 or 4 days in each place. We would survey the community and collect samples of blood, urine, and feces for testing. When we had the test results from a lab in the city, we would return to the community to share the results. This was very important to allow us to make decisions together. We also planned to have a meeting every 2 months, where the coordinating committee and community representatives could talk about how the study was going. -
We searched for funding for our work and the laboratory costs.
We formed a commission to find the money. After a lot of searching, we got money for the study from a group of doctors in Spain. -
We made maps of the communities.
People from each of the communities made maps showing oil wells, polluted water, and locations of villages and farms. At the same time we made a list of all the people who live in each community (a census). The list included each person’s name, age, and whether they were a man or a woman. -
We began visiting the communities and doing the study.
Instead of sending samples to the city, we set up a lab in the community school where we tested people’s blood, urine, and feces. (You need lab equipment and some training to do these tests, so we won’t explain them here.) In the mornings we went from house to house collecting the samples. Afterwards, another group went to each house doing surveys to gather information and the health promoters did a medical check-up of each person. -
Once we finished gathering all of the information, we put it in order.
Then we compared information from the polluted communities and the communities that were not polluted. We compared many things — the economic situation, the political situation, the local culture, and above all, people’s health. -
The last step was to write it all down and discuss it together.
This helped all of the communities involved to decide how to take action to improve our health.
The health study led to community action
The work of the health promoters showed people that many of their health problems were caused by oil pollution. Toxic chemicals from oil were found in the water and soil, and in people’s blood, urine, and feces. Knowing this helped them begin to work toward a solution. They knew that as long as the contamination continued, it would be difficult to have safe water, healthy food, or clean air.
A group formed, calling itself the Committee of Affected People, to petition the government for help. And the organization of health promoters continued supporting people’s health and showing how their health problems were caused by oil.
Another organization, the Front for the Defense of the Amazon, began a lawsuit to sue the oil company for the damage it had caused. Huge areas of the rain forest had been destroyed, and environmental laws about how damage had to be repaired were ignored. The foreign-owned oil company just took its profits and left.
The community study and lawsuit inspired other organizations to get involved in the struggle to save the rainforest and its people. Universities and medical schools in Ecuador, England, and the United States did more studies to support the lawsuit against the oil company, and to show that oil caused terrible health problems. These studies also helped the authors of this book learn about the health effects of oil.
But the key work was done by the health promoters. By teaching themselves how to study the health effects of oil, they worked locally on an issue of global importance. By showing how their neighbors’ health was being devastated by the destruction of the rain forest by multinational oil corporations, they brought local issues to the international arena. They were an inspiration to us as we wrote this book.