Word: dioxins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...raises anew the dangers of dioxin, the agency needs to communicate its findings to the public in a calm and clear fashion. No one is eager to touch off the kind of hysteria that preceded the government's decision to move against Alar, the growth regulator once used by apple growers. When celebrities like Meryl Streep spoke out against Alar and the press fanned public fears, some schools and parents rushed to pluck apples out of the mouths of children. Yet all this happened before scientists had reached any consensus about Alar's dangers...
Rhetoric about dioxin may push the same kind of emotional buttons. The chemical becomes relatively concentrated in fat-rich foods -- including human breast milk. Scientists estimate that a substantial fraction of an individual's lifetime burden of dioxin -- as much as 12% -- is accumulated during the first year of life. Nonetheless, the benefits of breast-feeding infants, the EPA and most everyone else would agree, far outweigh the hazards...
John Graham, director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, suggests that people should strive to keep the perils posed by dioxin in perspective and remember other threats that are more easily averted. "Phantom risks and real risks compete not only for our resources but also for our attention," Graham observes. "It's a shame when a mother worries about toxic chemicals, and yet her kids are running around unvaccinated and without bicycle helmets...
...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...