Word: pentachlorophenol
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...Association of California Water Agencies estimates that to eliminate it completely from water in that state alone would cost $3.7 billion. Is that a reasonable investment for preventing perhaps a score of deaths? Is $711 million per case of cancer too much to pay for the elimination of pentachlorophenol, a fungicide used in the lumber industry, or $80 billion per case too much to get rid of alachlor, an agricultural chemical...
Perhaps the most innovative technology involves the use of bacteria. A small Texas company called Detox Industries has developed microbes that eat PCBs, creosote and pentachlorophenol. Microbiologist Ananda Chakrabarty of the University of Illinois in Chicago has used a patented "molecular breeding" process to achieve the evolution of a bug that can convert the chief ingredient of the herbicide Agent Orange, 2,4,5-T, into carbon dioxide and chloride. In laboratory tests, his bacteria are so dependent upon the chemical that once they have consumed whatever is available they...
...changes-say, mutations in bacteria or bladder cancer in rats (as was the case with the animals fed huge amounts of saccharin). But what causes problems in one species may not be dangerous to another. In Michigan, researchers found that cows that licked barn wood treated with the preservative pentachlorophenol were starving to death. It turned out, explains Jerry Hook of Michigan State University's new Center for Environmental Toxicology, that "this substance is toxic to the bacteria in the cow rumen." Such toxicity did not show up in tests with rats...
...open sores developing on his cattle and the growing number of stillborn calves, Dairy Farmer George LeMunyon of Cedar Springs called in investigators. They discovered that cattle in his herd, and those on at least seven other farms in the state, have been ingesting a wood preservative called pentachlorophenol (PCP)-probably when the animals licked the sides of their feed bins. Because the preservative contains dioxin, a substance related to the highly toxic chemical that has made the Italian town of Seveso uninhabitable, state officials banned sales of PCP and quarantined suspect cattle. No PCP-contaminated milk has reached...
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