Word: toxication
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...fired power plants to coal by 1980 might at first glance seem worrisome to environmentalists because electric utilities have long argued that no existing technology can clean coal smoke. But the Environmental Protection Agency points to two recent studies showing that pollution-abatement devices now in use can remove toxic gases from smokestack emissions reli° ably and effectively. In any > case, says Michael McClos-8 key, executive director of the Sierra Club, "the limiting factor is not scrubbers, but whether we can produce sufficient coal supplies...
Trouble with VC. Although the EPA's decision sets a precedent for protecting human health from potentially toxic substances, it hardly compares in impact to the action by the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The agency established final limits for workers' exposure to vinyl chloride (vc), a colorless gas derived from chlorine and petrochemicals. It is the major ingredient in polyvinyl chloride (PVC)-the material from which seat covers, phonograph records, credit cards, detergent containers, floor tiles, shower curtains, and a vast number of other familiar plastic products are made. In total...
...Environmental Protection Agency, however, is more concerned about a contaminant that often appears as an impurity in manufactured 2,4,5-T -dioxin, which one EPA scientist has called "by far the most toxic product known to mankind." Small animals have been killed and birth defects caused in rats by dioxin concentrations of less than one part per billion-lethal levels so minute that researchers have trouble measuring them. Because of this experimental difficulty, the EPA says it still lacks sufficient evidence to press for a ban on 2,4,5-T. But, using a newly developed method of analysis...
...doctors were frustrated for years by the fact that standard doses of the highly toxic drug had no effect on osteogenic sarcoma cells, yet left patients suffering various unpleasant and even dangerous side effects-anemia, impaired liver and kidney function, mouth ulcers, nausea and hair loss...
...seen with the naked eye, plutonium was used in the more devastating A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki. It is also a natural byproduct of the 20th century alchemy that occurs inside all nuclear reactors using uranium. But plutonium is difficult (and thus expensive) to handle; it is so toxic that the inhalation of only a few specks of dust is sufficient to cause cancer...