Word: dioxins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Marilyn Leistner doesn't believe scientists anymore -- at least not the ones who once denounced dioxin but now downplay its dangers. Leistner was the last mayor of Times Beach, Mo., the town of 2,400 that the U.S. government evacuated and closed down in 1982 because it was contaminated with dioxin, considered by many to be one of the most fearsome of chemicals. The mayor saw dioxin's toxic effects all too clearly: the elderly forced out of their homes and into retirement centers, people so paranoid that every common illness was assumed to be dioxin poisoning, neighbors quarreling...
Well, no. It was not so much the chemical that caused the chaos as it was a questionable government judgment about the risks of dioxin. Now that some scientists are asserting -- 10 years too late -- that the concentrations of dioxin present at Times Beach were not harmful, the dispossessed residents, and the public in general, have every right to be confused...
...Corning's new chairman, Keith McKennon, a veteran of Dow Chemical's Agent Orange and dioxin crises, promised to cooperate with the FDA and hinted that the company might even help women who wanted their implants removed and could not afford the surgery. But Dow Corning's problems are not over. Last week a congressional committee asked for a criminal investigation into the firm's handling of implants. Among the evidence: a 1980 memo from a Dow Corning salesman complaining that the company's decision to put "a questionable lot of mammaries on the market . . . has to rank right...
Fresh studies and new interpretations of old data suggested that some feared substances -- dioxin, radon and asbestos -- were less toxic or carcinogenic than previously thought. They aren't exactly part of a complete breakfast, but slight exposures aren't inevitably fatal either...
...With so much at stake, the industry has understandably embraced the new thinking on dioxin. A furor erupted in the scientific community last winter when a trade association tried to overstate the conclusions of a research meeting at which some evidence favorable to dioxin was presented. Many of the participants did not realize that the conference had been underwritten in part with industry funds. "I agree that there is a lot of new science about dioxin," says Ellen Silbergeld, a toxicologist at the University of Maryland who attended the meeting. "But I don't agree over how that new knowledge...