Word: dioxin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...parliamentary investigating committee has issued a damning report on Italy's worst ecological disaster. On July 10, 1976, an explosion at the Swiss-owned Icmesa chemical plant discharged a thick white cloud of dioxin, one of the deadliest known poisons, over some 4,000 acres of the small industrial suburb 13 miles north of Milan. As the poison settled on homes and gardens in the following days, thousands of pets died, crops were infected and hundreds of people developed nausea, blurred vision and, especially among children, the disfiguring sores of a skin disease known as chloracne...
...caused no known human death thus far. All but two of the 187 children initially stricken with chloracne have recovered, and delayed-action cases that continue to occur have been responding to medication. Fear of other aftereffects, however, has infected the people psychologically. Medical researchers are concerned that the dioxin could have serious future effects on the livers of those exposed to it. Soon after the explosion, 33 pregnant women underwent therapeutic abortions for fear of malformed births. Since then the birth rate in Seveso has dropped sharply. Building Contractor Ugo Basilico, 41, father of a six-year...
...into the clear Italian sky. Workers and company officials assumed that the cloud and the droplets that fell from it onto homes, gardens and livestock were composed of trichlorophenol, an irritating but nonfatal chemical. But the overheating reactor sent the temperature of the TCP soaring above 200° C. Dioxin was formed-a substance so lethal that one hundred-millionth of a gram in a two-pound mixture would kill half the rabbits who might...
Trichlorophenol, the most active ingredient of the defoliant 2,4,5-T, had already proved its baleful capabilities in Viet Nam, where the defoliant was held responsible for liver cancers and birth defects. The dioxin seems certain to be worse. Within a few days of the explosion, residents of the town watched their cats and dogs stagger and die. Birds literally dropped out of the air People experienced nausea and blurred vision; many developed chloracne, their skin erupting in painful, disfiguring running sores...
Fuller is guilty of a few errors in his reporting of this full-scale disaster. It is misleading to suggest that the cancer fatal to a Seveso woman within a few months after the explosion was caused by dioxin; cancer has a long latency period and takes many months if not years to develop. Nor can it be proved that cancer is a result of something so gross as damage to the chromosomes; most scientists agree that the triggering mechanism is far more subtle...