Word: dioxins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...defoliants--Agent Orange--sprayed by U.S. aircraft killing the coconut trees that provided the main source of their income. Vo Van Canh, 49, a former Viet Cong, points to his 17-year-old son, who has the arrested development of a two-year-old, the result, says Vo, of dioxin poisoning. At the Tu Du Women's Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc says her studies, though not conclusive, suggest that women exposed to the defoliants have 15 times as many fetal deaths as those who were not exposed...
Seveso, Italy, July 10,1976. Between 1 Ib. and 22 Ibs. of poisonous dioxin were released into the atmosphere over an area of 4,500 acres when a chemical reaction at the Hoffman-La Roche plant set off an explosion. More than 1,000 residents were forced to flee, and many children developed a disfiguring rash called chloracne, but no lives were lost...
...affect Times Beach, Mo. Windows in the houses there are boarded up, and the wind whistles down the lonely streets of a newly created ghost town. Last year more than 2,000 inhabitants left when the water and ground were found to be contaminated with dangerous levels of dioxin...
More chronically worrisome to environmentalists are the secondary disasters, those that lead to the slow poisoning of ground or water. Hazardous-and nuclear-waste dumping fit into this category. With little knowledge or thought of the long-term consequences, factory trash containing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), chloroform, dioxin and radioactive traces is buried underground or dumped into the ocean. Although absolute links are difficult to prove scientifically, many of the chemicals in hazardous wastes are believed to cause cancer and birth defects. More than 66,000 different compounds are used in industry, and less than 2% have been tested for possible...
Western Europe also has its share of potential disasters. That lesson was made clear eight years ago, when a chemical reaction at a plant in Seveso, outside Milan, Italy, set off a mild explosion, discharging a cloud of between 1 lb. and 22 lbs. of poisonous dioxin into the atmosphere. Since then, 10 million cu. ft. of contaminated earth has been buried in large pits and covered with clay, plastic sheets and cement. Newly seeded grass masks any signs of the event. Although no one died because of the mishap, it remains to be seen whether the local cancer rate...