Word: dioxins
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...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...
Using such calculations for dioxin produced a conclusion that ingesting an infinitesimal amount of the compound each day over a lifetime -- about 0.006 trillionths of a gram per kilogram of body weight (or 0.014 trillionths of an ounce for a 150-lb. man) -- would cause 1 cancer among 1 million people. The contamination at Times Beach was 1,000 times as great as this safety limit...
Since then, however, a lot more has been learned about how dioxin affects the body. As a result, some scientists believe dioxin and other chemicals may trigger cancer only if a certain threshold amount is present -- and that amount could be well over 1,000 times as great as the safety limit, i.e., above the level of most of the contamination at Times Beach. If so, the government has reason to amend its regulations on many compounds in addition to dioxin. One of the biggest beneficiaries would be the paper industry, which is under pressure to reduce the level...
...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...