Word: dioxin
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...alarm went off with Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring and has been sounding ever since. We live, environmentalists warn, in a world laced with dangerous chemicals, from powerful pesticides to toxic industrial wastes like dioxin and PCBs. Despite periodic waves of public concern and efforts at government regulation (the 1972 banning of DDT in the U.S., for example), the chemicals are still found in small but measurable amounts in air, water, soil -- and our own tissues. Many scientists have long argued that even tiny doses of pollutants can cause cancer in humans, but the contention is hotly disputed...
...Environmental Protection Agency is expected to raise the issue this week when it releases a major report on the effects of dioxin, one of the most ubiquitous of the suspect chemicals. Dioxin is the name given to a class of chlorine-containing compounds that are waste by-products of many industrial processes such as paper making and waste incineration. Although the release of dioxin has been curbed in recent years, traces of it still permeate the environment...
According to sources familiar with drafts of the EPA report, it will say that dioxin remains a serious potential threat to human health and that possible links between the chemical and health problems, among them reproductive ills, should be further explored. "This study ranks with the Surgeon General's pronouncement that smoking causes lung cancer," says Sierra Club pollution expert George Colling, prematurely and hyperbolically, in the latest issue of the organization's monthly newspaper. And Peter deFur of the Environmental Defense Fund predicts that the document will lead to much tighter regulations, and in some cases even...
...question, many of which contain chlorine, are clearly toxic and carcinogenic. On the other hand, the case that humans are being affected by very low concentrations remains far from certain. The existing evidence is largely circumstantial, based on extrapolations from animal studies, laboratory work on the chemistry of dioxin and other molecules, and statistics on human disease that may or may not turn out to be accurate or relevant...
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...