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Rhetoric about dioxin may push the same kind of emotional buttons. The chemical becomes relatively concentrated in fat-rich foods -- including human breast milk. Scientists estimate that a substantial fraction of an individual's lifetime burden of dioxin -- as much as 12% -- is accumulated during the first year of life. Nonetheless, the benefits of breast-feeding infants, the EPA and most everyone else would agree, far outweigh the hazards...
...just a cinema-verite jumble. The characters are fleshed out in a few deft strokes -- one doctor (Anthony Edwards) is being wooed by a cushy private practice -- without hype or sentimentality. These are doctors of stoic demeanor and blunt bedside manner, yet they're more honestly compassionate than the breast beaters of Chicago Hope. The real tragedy of the emergency room, they realize, is that they don't have the luxury of lingering over tragedy. The triumph of ER is that it gives hope that even in the age of time- slot programming, a good show can still get noticed...
Finally, several hormone-related human disorders, including low sperm counts, testicular and breast cancers and endometriosis (a painful condition in which uterine cells migrate to other parts of the pelvic area), have arguably been on the rise in the decades since DDT, dioxin and the like first entered the food chain. Says Thomas Burke of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health: "What we have now is identification of a potential hazard, and that's all we have. What the implications are we don't know yet, and we need to clarify that...
...human fetal exposure to such chemicals as PCBs could produce disorders affecting behavior, immune-system functioning, memory and learning. She also surveyed the literature on humans exposed to diethylstilbestrol, or DES, a synthetic drug that is related to estrogen. DES can be used to prevent miscarriage, treat prostate and breast cancer or reduce the symptoms of menopause; it can even promote growth in sheep and cows. But in 1971, after studies linked its use by pregnant women with reproductive-system abnormalities, infertility and cancer in their offspring, the FDA decreed that DES should no longer be used to prevent miscarriage...
...relationship is established, as in major industrial accidents, the data are confusing. In the years after a large dioxin release in 1976 in Seveso, Italy, for example, the incidence of leukemias, lymphomas and soft-tissue cancers in men and gall-bladder and bile- duct cancers in women rose -- but breast and endometrial cancers in women actually went down. Possible reason: dioxin may sometimes interfere with the hormone system in beneficial ways...