People speak about the oil spill impacts

The Deep Water Horizon (DWH) Oil Spill was one of the greatest environmental accidents in the history of the United States. This study compares information sources capturing health effects of the disaster from sentinel surveillance systems, crowd sourcing, and household surveys having differing levels of rigor. Unlike formal sentinel surveillance systems, self-reported symptoms from crowd sourced information and household surveys indicate that coastal community households experienced health effects from the spill. These included eye irritation, respiratory effects and headaches. The problems were predominantly self treated but were a cause of concern among local populations. Sentinel site data did not detect unusual patterns of utilization for curative care in areas affected by the Oil Spill. The crowd sourced dynamically mapped data provided early indications of these perceived health effects. The more rigorous and the low cost basic community surveys provided similar estimates of health effects. This study demonstrates the importance of gauging perceived effects of environmental accidents and the inadequacy of current sentinel surveillance approaches to assess them. It also demonstrates that very low cost techniques can detect such concerns as well as expensive techniques. The use of crowd sourced and dynamically mapped data holds particular promise for ensuring that citizen concerns are brought to public attention. Recommendations include more engagement of the formal public health community in the use of these new techniques.