Word: dioxin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...surprising that a new generation of incinerators is developing. But NIMBY operates here too: some Minneapolis residents have mounted strong protests against a burner under construction near the downtown area. Like anti-landfill sentiment, opposition to incinerators has a reasoned basis. Environmentalist Barry Commoner insists that incinerators actually synthesize dioxin, a highly poisonous substance. True, scrubbers and other filters can eliminate dioxin from smoke, but not its concentrated form in the ash residue, causing a prickly problem of how and where to get rid of that hazardous waste...
...solemn controversy. Last year a local physician noticed an unusually high number of cancer-related deaths in the tiny riverside hamlet of Hartford (pop. 300), whose people have always been accustomed to eating fish from the Pigeon River. In May, after EPA tests detected tiny traces of cancer-causing dioxin in fish from the Pigeon, the survivors of one husband and wife, who died of cancer within a month of ! each other, filed a $6 million wrongful-death suit against Champion. The dioxin controversy may tempt Cocke County to take a second look at the compromise plan to improve...
...longest jury trial in U.S. history -- a 44-month marathon -- finally ended last week in Belleville, Ill. The long-suffering twelve-member circuit court jury found Monsanto Co. guilty of failing to warn the town of Sturgeon, Mo., about the risk of a 1979 spill containing the toxic chemical dioxin. The jury ordered the chemical company to pay $16.2 million in damages, then left the courthouse to celebrate with Judge Richard Goldenhersh over margaritas and daiquiris at a nearby Mexican restaurant. Monsanto, meanwhile, announced that it will appeal...
Every morning of the trial, Monsanto's lawyers trundle boxes of documents to court on baggage carts from leased offices two blocks away. The courtroom is cluttered with 4-ft. by 5-ft. symptom boards, outlining alleged dioxin-related plaintiff ills ranging from headaches and high blood pressure to depression and decreased sexual desire. Carr concedes that "none of my clients is falling down sick." But the core of his case concerns possible future cancer developing from dioxin exposure in the 1979 spill...
...Carnow, director of environmental medicine at the University of Illinois, spent 76 days on the witness stand -- at a fee of $3,000 a day to his Chicago health-consultancy firm -- putting the dots up as expert witness for the plaintiffs, contending the ills the dots represent could be dioxin-related. Monsanto's rebuttal expert, Dr. James R. Webster, chief of medicine at Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital, is now in the process of disputing Dr. Carnow, dot by dot, testifying that all alleged ills either predated the spill or could have been caused by something other than dioxin...