Word: dioxins
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Meanwhile, fears about toxic wastes continue to grow. Each day more and more communities discover that they are living near dumps or atop ground that has been contaminated by chemicals whose once strange names and initials--dioxin, vinyl chloride, PBB and PCB, as well as such familiar toxins as lead, mercury and arsenic--have become household synonyms for mysterious and deadly poisons. "The problem is worse than it was five years ago," contends New Jersey Democrat James Florio, who as a Congressman from one of the most seriously contaminated states became the key author of the 1980 Superfund...
...Orange case will never be settled to everyone's satisfaction. Last week U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein dismissed a suit by seven manufacturers of the defoliant. They had sought to force the Government to contribute to the $180 million fund created for veterans who claimed that exposure to the dioxin-contaminated chemical left them with various ailments and caused birth defects in some of their children. The Government, said the judge, was "within its legal rights in refusing" to pay, since the veterans never proved that the chemical caused their problems. But Weinstein in effect criticized the U.S. for abandoning...
...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...
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...