Word: selikoff
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...waste products poses one of the most complex and expensive environmental control and cleanup tasks in history. Says Douglas M. Costle, administrator of the EPA: "We didn't understand that every barrel stuck into the ground was a ticking time bomb, primed to go off." Predicts Dr. Irving Selikoff, director of the Environmental Sciences Laboratory of New York City's Mount Sinai Medical School: "Toxic waste will be the major environmental and public health problem facing the U.S. in the '80s." The EPA estimates that the U.S. is generating more than 77 billion Ibs. of hazardous chemical...
Swollen Joints. Conducted by a team headed by Dr. Irving Selikoff of New York's Mount Sinai Medical Center, the study examined a total of 1,029 people, 638 of whom were randomly selected from both quarantined and unquarantined farms or had eaten food produced on them. The remainder were employees of the company that manufactured the fire retardant and others referred by doctors or checked at their own request. Among the randomly selected group, 37% had such neurological symptoms as loss of memory, muscular weakness, coordination problems and headaches; 27% suffered from painful or swollen joints...
...Selikoff stressed that his conclusions are preliminary and do not necessarily apply to the millions of people in the state who may have consumed PBB-contaminated farm products. But convinced by the study that the chemicals were harmful to humans, Governor William Milliken and Bobby D. Crim, speaker of the state's house of representatives, immediately urged that the levels of PBBs permitted in food by state regulations be drastically reduced...
...growing amounts of harmful pollutants, some of them chemicals that did not exist a century, a decade or even a year or two ago. Result: an increase in many old ailments and the emergence of new ones-all traceable to substances in air, water and food. Says Dr. Irving Selikoff of New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine: "Environmental disease is becoming the disease of the century...
Doctors and environmentalists nonetheless insist that new antipollution laws are essential. "What is an acceptable risk for cancer?" asks Dr. Selikoff. "One out of a hundred? More? Less? With cancer, any risk is too high." To reduce these hazards even further, Selikoff and his colleagues are urging enactment of even stricter new regulations on the manufacture and use of substances known to be toxic (see box) and better screening to keep those suspected of causing cancer or other illnesses out of the environment...