Word: dioxin
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...many of the same audiences seem blissfully unconcerned about chemical accidents, even though some compounds may retain their toxic strength longer than radioactive trash. Worse, many people are willing to live with large amounts of one of these chemicals, a compound called 2,3,7,8 tetrachlo-rodibenzo-p-dioxin, also known as dioxin. The attitude may prove suicidal. A common contaminant of several widely used herbicides, dioxin is so deadly that a few ounces could poison whole communities...
...Federal Government has a considerable regulatory apparatus to prevent nuclear radiation poisoning. Nothing is being done about dioxin, and it is just as toxic and there is a lot more of it around." So complained Victor J. Yannacone, Jr., the lawyer who got DDT banned...
Last week Yannacone had reason to be pleased. Citing an "alarming" incidence of miscarriages among women in Alsea, Ore., where there has been considerable forest spraying, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered an emergency ban on two popular herbicides, both of which contain dioxin. One is 2,4,5-T, an ingredient of the Viet Nam defoliant, Agent Orange. The other, Silvex, is used in many popular weed killers...
...serious consideration in the Senate. Several private citizens are sueing the EPA, the Forestry Service and the Dow Chemical Company, one of the major manufacturers of the herbicide. Dow denies any responsibility and published the results of company-sponsored experiments that deny any connection between the adverse effects of dioxin dosage in lab animals and dioxin intake in humans...
Bureaucratic indifference to human suffering is nothing new. But the continued inaction of the Veterans' Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency is criminally callous in the face of scientific evidence indicating the toxicity of dioxin. The United States is now turning a weapon of war back on its own people, tragically disregarding the available example of Vietnam...