"We all agreed -- and we're talking 50 people -- that dispersants were the lesser of two negative possibilities, of two bad choices," Ron Tjeerdema, chair of the department of environmental toxicology at the University of California at Davis, told AFP.

Tjeerdema was one of 50 experts who held two days of meetings organized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) last week in Louisiana to decide whether or not dispersants should continue to be used in the fight against the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

A report compiled by the panel said: "Surface application of dispersants is acceptable."

"Transferring the risk from the surface to the top 10 meters (of the water column) is the lesser of many evils," it said.

"You have two choices and either choice will impact something," said Tjeerdema.

"Either you leave oil from a spill untreated and it will flow towards shore, coating beaches and marshlands and estuaries and causing tremendous damage to land, plants, birds and mammals," said Tjeerdema, who was studied oil spills and dispersants for 25 years.

"Or if you disperse the oil, what it does is it breaks it into small droplets and it creates a fog in the water column below.

"That tends to be a problem for plankton, larvae of various fish, oysters and so forth," he said.

The NOAA meeting was called as the total amount of dispersant used in the Gulf approached the million gallon mark, which "is something we've never done before," said Tjeerdema.

"There's not a lot of back-up research to guide us in terms of what are the ultimate impacts and how efficacious the dispersant will be, and obviously, we didn't have the time to do lots of research to figure this all out, because they need to do this immediately," said Tjeerdema.

The experts' report also recommended that dispersant application be monitored over the long term, "to better model where dispersed oil is going."

The use of chemical dispersants to break up oil slicks is controversial, with some saying Corexit, the dispersant BP is using in the Gulf, is toxic and has made fishermen who were paid by BP to apply it to the slick ill.

Others say it has probably killed off marine life and that its long-term effects are not known, especially in the quantities it is being used in the Gulf.

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