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Infants Ingest 77 Times the Safe Level of Dioxin
An anonymous reader writes "The Environmental Protection Agency is holding public hearings beginning today to review a proposed safe exposure limit for dioxin, a known carcinogen and endocrine disruptor produced as a common industrial byproduct. It's all but impossible to avoid exposure to dioxin. Women exposed to it pass it on to fetuses in the womb, and both breast milk and formula have been shown to contain the stuff. Research done by the Environmental Working Group has shown that a nursing infant ingests an amount 77 times higher than what the EPA has proposed as safe exposure. Adults are exposed to 1,200 times more dioxin than the EPA suggests is safe, mostly through eating meat, dairy, and shellfish."
It's the dihydrogen monoxide that's killing us.
But what exactly is accomplished by reviewing the safe exposure limit? Apparently it's unavoidable and is already consumed in orders of magnitude higher levels than is recommended.
New leading cause of death in the US?
wouldnt this mean its safe to ingest more than the reported levels? That's not necessarily a good thing, but it does take a bit of the sensationalism out of the story
It seems to me that if adults typically are exposed to 1200 times what is considered a safe level, then either every adult should be seriously ill from exposure, or the EPA standard for what is a safe level is a bit unreasonable.
How about... 5 fun things you can do with your baby's placenta!!?!?!?!?!? (from the same site as this "article"). I suppose any excuse to beat up on "evil industry" will always fly on Slashdot.
Next thing you know there'll be the usual litany of +5 insightfuls about how "big media" (led by Catie Couric) regularly pumps out pro-insecticide propaganda. No I'm not joking.. the regular scare pieces about anything that might be remotely toxic are the product of "big pesticide" to bore us to death with obviously untrue hysteria so that we accidentally let them get away with poisoning all of us!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
PCDD exposures are proven/suspected in famous cases including Agent Orange produced by Monsanto sprayed over vegetation during the Vietnam war, the Seveso disaster, and the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko.
Great another thing my Vegan friend can brag about FOREVER even though he doesn't know what dioxins are.
... if the official dioxin-exposure limits are set unreasonably low, perhaps for political reasons unrelated to human or animal health.
That settles it. Feed the kid formula and leave the tit for daddy.
Have gnu, will travel.
Dioxin Dolly when you need her?
http://www.picturesforsadchildren.com/index.php?comicID=274
Emotions! In your brain!
Most chemical exposure limits are messed up or just sorely out of date.
here's the EWR's press release http://www.ewg.org/dioxin/press
Environmental Working Group's dioxin timeline, complete with citations http://www.ewg.org/dioxin/timeline
I'm a vegan, politcally I'm a progressive (let the flaming begin), and even I was disgusted with the "article" linked in TFS. Piss poor choice dudes, as you easily could have linked to the EWR's press release and allowed the discussion to go from there. But instead we start with a shit "article" from an alarmist site, which stokes an immediate onslaught of comments that outright dismiss even a _possibility_ that dioxin is harmful to humans.
In my 12 years of hanging around here, I sure do miss the days when we'd have a discussion based on the SCIENCE of whether or not dioxin is worthy of our concern
About 10 years ago, in my country(outside the US), they found the greatest levels came from the insides of milk containers(the cardboard ones). For consumer perception reasons, the inside should be snow white, not brown. The whitening process was a bleach based one and the chemical contained dioxin. Apparently, a chlorine based oxidation whitening method is safe. But of course, more costly. How are your cardboard products whitened? Don't assume in this day and age its the safe method.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
"Adults are exposed to 1,200 times more dioxin than the EPA suggests is safe, mostly through eating meat, dairy, and shellfish."
So, couldn't you, uh, just not eat those things?
I can tell you for a fact that it's not impossible.
Cue pro/anti vegan flame war in 3,2,1...
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
The potential effects of accumulated dioxin are well established. The finding that infants and adults regularly consume more than the EPA limit suggests that reviews of the limit and the enforcement of environmental regulations are in order. The myriad unstudied, undocumented, widely-disseminated, and widely-used chemicals in the environment also demand scrutiny -- BEFORE they become widespread. Presently, industrial regulation follows the Pandora model: open the box and see what happens. Precaution is a severely underrepresented entity at the EPA (though curiously the DEA and FDA get plenty, within their respective scopes).
I may not agree on everything this man said, and hell he wouldn't want me to. But he sure did nail some things right:
Fear of Germs
Where did this sudden fear of germs come from in this country? Have you noticed this? The media constantly running stories about all the latest infections? Salmonella, E-coli, hanta virus, bird flu, and Americans will panic easily so everybody's running around scrubbing this and spraying that and overcooking their food and repeatedly washing their hands, trying to avoid all contact with germs. It's ridiculous and it goes to ridiculous lengths.
In prisons, before they give you lethal injection, they swab your arm with ALCOHOL. Wouldn't want some guy to go to hell AND be sick. Fear of germs, why these fuckin' pussies. You can't even get a decent hamburger anymore they cook the shit out of everything now 'cause everyone's afraid of FOOD POISONING! Hey, wheres you sense of adventure? Take a fuckin' chance will you? Hey you know how many people die of food poisoning in this country? Nine thousand, thats all, its a minor risk.
Take a fuckin' chance bunch of goddamn pussies. Besides, what d'ya think you have an immune system for? It's for killing germs! But it needs practice, it needs germs to practice on. So if you kill all the germs around you, and live a completely sterile life, then when germs do come along, you're not gonna be prepared. And never mind ordinary germs, what are you gonna do when some super virus comes along that turns your vital organs into liquid shit?! I'll tell you what your gonna do ... you're gonna get sick. You're gonna die and your gonna deserve it because you're fucking weak and you got a fuckin' weak immune system!
Let me tell you a true story about immunization ok. When I was a little boy in New York city in the nineteen-forties, we swam in the Hudson river. And it was filled with raw sewage! OK? We swam in raw sewage, you know, to cool off. And at that time the big fear was polio. Thousands of kids died from polio every year. But you know something? In my neighborhood no one ever got polio. No one! EVER! You know why? Cause WE SWAM IN RAW SEWAGE! It strengthened our immune system, the polio never had a prayer. We were tempered in raw shit!
George Carlin
Disclaimer: I trusted Google on getting a "reliable" quote, I read most of it, but the typos made me twitch too
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
It sounds like the EPA pulled the "safe level" out of their asses. If it was as dangerous as our bureaucrat overlords claim, babies should instantly burst into cancerous blobs of puss...yet longevity is longer than ever and more humans than ever live longer and healthier lives.
Good thing the Almighty State is there to get our backs (wink,wink) -- if we could only be more thankful by letting them tax us more and more.
I've been watching this site for that long and I don't remember a time when most of these discussions were much more than flame wars with made up statistics, dubious assertions and ad hominem on both sides.
I do agree that it's gotten worse in recent years, though.
Courtesy of Yes, Minister:
Concerned woman: Listen, I've heard that this factory will be making the chemical that poisoned Seveso.
Jim Hacker: Now that's not true. The chemical in Seveso was dioxin. This is metadioxin.
Woman: Well that must be virtually the same thing.
Hacker: No, it's just a similar name.
Woman: It's the same name, only with 'meta' stuck on the front.
Hacker: And that makes all the difference.
Woman: Why, what does 'meta' mean?
Hacker: (baffled) What does 'meta' mean, Humphrey?
Sir Humphrey: It's quite simple. It means 'with' or 'after', sometimes 'beyond'. It's from the Greek. In other words, with or after dioxin, sometimes beyond dioxin. It depends whether it's the accusative or the genitive. With the accusative it's beyond or after, with the genitive it's with. As in Latin, of course, as you no doubt obviously recall, where the ablative is used for words needing a sense of 'with' to preceed them.
Bernard: But of course there isn't an ablative in Greek, is there Sir Humphrey?
Sir Humphrey: Well done, Bernard, well done.
Hacker: You see?
Woman: Not really, no.
Good food and caffeine. Few things can't be improved by that.
Is it a binary thing? 1200x dioxin maybe no worse than >1x dioxin? Once you get >1x dioxin, maybe you can swim in the stuff and not have any worse chance of cancer? It's certainly not 1200x worse...
or maybe, just maybe, it's not the doomsday scenario environmental nazi's want us to believe? keeping the population under control by scaring them isn't just for bush
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Thank God it's not in the liquor.
Anybody manage to find the actual dosage which the EPA is proposing as "safe"? I find lots of scary propaganda about finding "pollutants" in infant blood, or adult blood, or whatever, and all sorts of scary propaganda about "1200 times" and "77 times" and even "a hamburger and a milkshake" but NOT ONE hard number. How many quintillionths of a milligram per kilogram dosage levels are they talking about, anyway?
I officially blame my sexual deviancy, social disorders, and acute dislike for 96% of the food in the world on dioxin. Also, my computer case is all dusty inside. Must be the fucking dioxin.
Again.
So the article claims that low level exposure is enough to cause serious diseases. It also claims that adults regularly ingest 120,000% of the safe amount. Shouldn't we all be dead? No. This is just another load of bullshit being pushed by a bunch of whinging little vegans who are desperate for some excuse to justify their idiotic choices.
I wrote a paper in 9th grade (13 years ago) about the effects of rising dioxin levels on human fertility statistics. If it's indeed true that human male fertility has been falling steadily since the 1930s, dioxins are most likely the reason. Because they are estrogenic and can cross the placenta, they can cause numerous other birth defects as well, including undescended testes, hypogonadism, micropenis, hermaphroditism, other intersex conditions, and gender identity disorders (if a male fetus' brain or body - but not both - develops in a typically female way because of the presence of dioxin). In mice, it produced male mice who would assume the typically female position with other males, and who were infertile.
The continued presence of dioxins in the environment may well lead to the extinction of the human race, not now or even in 50 years, but whenever the concentration in our tissue (which increases with successive generations) is high enough that none of us are fertile anymore. Of course, by then we'll probably be able to create new people via in-vitro or cloning.
Ripper: lifts a folder off of his desk and tosses it aside, revealing a blued, pearl handled .45 automatic.
Mandrake: Do I take it, sir, that you are threatening a brother officer with a gun?
Ripper: Mandrake, I suppose it never occurred to you that while we're chatting here so enjoyably, a decision is being made by the President and the Joint Chiefs in the war room at the Pentagon. And when they realize there is no possibility of recalling the wing, there will be only one course of action open: total committment.
Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenzo once said about war?
Mandrake: No. I don't think I do sir, no.
Ripper: He said war was to important to be left to the Generals. When he said that, fifty years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. ...
Ripper: through his cigar Mandrake,
Mandrake: Yes, Jack?
Ripper: Have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water?
Mandrake: Well, no I... I can't say I have, Jack.
Ripper: Vodka. That's what they drink, isn't it? Never water?
Mandrake: Well I... I believe that's what they drink, Jack. Yes.
Ripper: On no account will a commie ever drink water, and not without good reason.
Mandrake: Oh, ah, yes. I don't quite.. see what you're getting at, Jack.
Ripper: Water. That's what I'm getting at. Water. Mandrake, water is the source of all life. Seven tenths of this earth's surface is water. Why, you realize that.. seventy percent of you is water.
Mandrake: Uhhh God...
Ripper: And as human beings, you and I need fresh, pure water to replenish our precious bodily fluids.
Mandrake: Yes. chuckles nervously
Ripper: You beginning to understand?
Mandrake: Yes. chuckles. begins laughing/crying quietly
Ripper: Mandrake. Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure grain alcohol?
Mandrake: Well it did occur to me, Jack, yes.
Ripper: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?
Mandrake: Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes.
Ripper: Well do you now what it is?
Mandrake: No. No, I don't know what it is. No.
Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?
Window in the office is shot through by automatic weapons fire. ...
Mandrake: laughs Jack, don't you think we'd be better off in some other part of the room, away from all this flying glass?
Ripper: Ah, naah. We're ok here. Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridated water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake. Children's ice cream?
Mandrake: Good Lord.
Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?
Mandrake: No. No, I don't, Jack. No.
Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty six. Nineteen fortysix, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your postwar commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard core commie works.
Mandrake: Jack... Jack, listen, tell me, ah... when did you first become, well, develop this theory.
Ripper: Well, I ah, I I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.
Mandrake: sighs fearfully
Ripper: Yes a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly: loss of essence.
Mandrake: Yes...
Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women... women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.
Mandrake: Heh heh... yes. ...
The study that provides the clearest counter-example to your anecdote was on mature human males and tested the effects of soy phytoestrogens on their sex hormone levels as well as a few other factors. The result showed no negative effect:
Because changes in sex hormones have a much greater effect on infants because they are actively developing, there have been even more studies showing that soy forumula has no negative effect to sexual development:
I am an analytical chemist and a pioneer in the development of analytical methods to measure dioxins at extremely low levels in a wide variety of environmental and industrial matrices from 1967 through 1994 as an employee of the Dow Chemical Company. I have published many of these seminal studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals. One of these studies was the first to establish that dioxins are formed in natural processes (such as forest fires) which produces a natural background of dioxins (at very low levels) which existed before man evolved from the apes through modern times.
As an expert in this area, I have served on an Expert Advisory Committee formed by the Canadian government to assess the impact of dioxins in that country. I was the only US citizen on the committee. The report of our findings was published by the Canadian government in 1983.
I have presented papers of my work at American Chemical Society meetings, Annual Dioxin Conference Meetings, and sat in on early meetings of toxicologists to discuss methodology and the significance of dioxin levels found in the environment and industrial settings.
I was an informal advisor to Italian government laboratories in Milan and Rome which analyzed for dioxins associated with the Seveso incident, advising them on how to calculate findings from raw data and how to present the data for interpretation by the toxicology community. This was during a time I was training Dow laboratory personnel in Germany to perform dioxin analyses.
I was involved in developing methods for analyzing Agent Orange (used as a defoliant in Vietnam) for the US Government .
With this background, I have developed informed opinions about dioxins and their hazards.
My dioxin web site
Lactose-intolerance and vegetarianism ftw!
I skimmed over the headlines and misread this as Midgets Infest 77 towns... Imagine my disappointment when I continued on to the article.
Take what ye can. Give nothing back!
According to some material I have been reading, dioxin and dioxin-like compounds are highest in breast milk in the early stages of breastfeeding. And that formula has far lower levels of these toxins, especially the ones that contain plant based proteins. The plant based ones are not encouraged by UK nutritional specialists. The same book went further to say that the benefits of breast milk still outweigh the disadvantages of having higher dioxin levels but that mothers who intend on breastfeeding might consider changing their diet to remove the major sources of dioxin exposure for humans. Wiki says those are: * Animal fats found in meats * Full fat dairy products * Fatty fish (herring, mackerel, salmon, sardines, trout, tuna) (accounting for 96% of human exposure)
problem solved once again. seriously guys, that dystopian wasteland we all giggle about at the movies is becoming more and more a reality every day. climate change, mercury in fish, dioxins in meat, produce contamination from
pig farm and bovine wastewater runoff, megacorps like monsanto pushing unsafe genetically modified foods and silencing dissenters, and a growing population of adults that are completely fucking incapable of cooking anything outside hotdogs and microwave hot pockets should be a call to action.
Good people go to bed earlier.
autism
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Even with clear warnings of the hazards, people continue to ingest and pass on this health hazard, therefore the only reasonable course of action is for government regulation.
"Women exposed to it pass it on to fetuses in the womb, and both breast milk and formula have been shown to contain the stuff."
Obviously they must be forbidden then from passing substances on.
Actually, we are all dead. Everyone dies eventually and most people die of cancer, heart attack, or stroke. Is it possible that Dioxin causes any of these? If so, then it is killing us.
Stop being so shortsighted. I don't know whether or not Dioxin is poisonous, but you seem to have reached a conclusion based on the article summary. That alone speaks to your lack of critical thinking. You fail at science.
Hormone imbalances are also a problem:
Moreso, the impact of all this extra estrogen is having on people (especially men) is particularly worrying. Maybe meat is making today's boys a little soft.
Given that a tiny proportion of cows actually slaughtered for sale of their parts have actually eaten grass in their lives, they are also full of all sorts of pesticides, dioxins in the fatty tissue being one particularly nasty result. These mutants don't eat eat grass, as their ancestors have, but corn, soya beans and oats. 70% of all grains grown in the U.S are fed to animals to turn into tissue which is then eaten. A highly inefficient and environmentally costly source of proteins.
Like it or not, any non-grass-grown meat is pretty much poisonous. Sadly grass grown meat is such a tiny proportion of meat eaten as it's just not a market-competitive means of production. It's all hormones, antibiotics and a high protein diet for the animals that are eaten these days. Any vet will tell you we're eating very sick beasts.
Even we Europeans are not safe - most of the meat eaten here is raised on imported grains. Farmers have a practice of putting a f
... and thousands dying because of some stupid nationlistic blood feud with the serbs arguing over land the size of a postage stamp.
Those whackjobs have a pretty powerful lobby and are largely responsible for senseless crap like this.
If adults really ingested 1200 times the "safe" level of something, they'd all be dead.
Does organic milk, and/or meat, have lower levels of dioxin? I suppose it would help to be a vegetarian.
Perhaps a better question is why does almost every other first world country have a longer life expectancy than the US? (not a huge margin, but there is some).
How does Cuba have a longer life expectancy? Why do the majority of first world nations, and again, Cuba, have lower infant mortality than the US?
What is something most all of those countries have, and yet spend less (per capita) on than the US. hrm...
A lack of subsidized corn.
Subsidized corn means the USA has lots of cheap, shitty food sweetened with high fructose corn syrup and fried in corn oil. In other words, lots of Calories. Lots of Calories means lots of obesity (borne out by statistics.) Lots of obesity means earlier death and higher infant mortality.
In fact, it's a wonder we live as long as we do. Americans are the most overweight people on the planet. Keeping lardasses like us alive so long demonstrates that we have a fantastic health care system...and really fucked up national priorities.
If infants are ingesting 77 times the safe limit and adults are ingesting 1,200 times the safe limit, it make me wonder, maybe the "safe" limit is a little too low. We are still here, replying to this story and our kids are still playing in yard... If you want to protect the population form everything, you need to stop the manufacturing of.. well... everything... You want a car and a computer at a reasonable price, deal with it. Could this be an over reaction to get a story and some "air time"... I think so.
Or at least the evidence is weak enough so that WHO does not address it in your quote or elsewhere on the site.
Dioxin is produced by burn barrels and old power plants. Good news: it can be extremely reduced by new burners that control the burning temperature and by using adequate filters.
The obvious solution: Outlaw burn barrels and phase out old coal plants - Maybe with incentives to modernize (which is also more efficient and even more cost effective in the long run).
The American way: First, whatever environmental laws this administration pushes, the next one will overturn. This makes investment-security for companies that want to modernize just terrible. Second, instead of investing in equipment, the leading corporations will find it easier and cheaper, to buy congress and do some FUD advertisements (CO2 is life). This will keep companies that would like to modernize out of business till the plants are old enough that the grid brakes down. Third, the people affected will actually defend the polluters and fight anyone claiming that dioxin is bad. I can already see the ads: Evil government wanting to pass legislation that will cut off affordable electricity to hard working families. Evil government claiming that dioxin is bad. When in fact dioxin has been around for thousands of years and is a byproduct that occurs naturally, even in a forest fire. Sponsored by the American Families for Safe Energy Foundation.
Any job openings in the FUD industry?
The 1200 number is 100% bullshit (ironically, a good source of dioxin). According to this 2001 study of American average dioxin intake, the average adult takes in 2.4pg/kg. That's 2.4 trillionths of a gram per kilogram of body mass. However, since dioxin is highly toxic, the EPA is proposing to limit it to 0.7pg/kg, which is 3.4 times lower than the current intake. One may note that 3.4 is not equal to 1200. (No really! Not even if you round up.)
Oddly enough, the same study indicates that infants take in 42pg/kg, which is 60 times the recommended dose. While 77 is more than 60, they might be using a different study. Why mix real numbers with bogus ones? My guess is because nobody will remember any number other than 1200, and when you get called out, you can claim it was a typo.
Stop using your own mod points to defend your own stupid ideas. "Troll" ain't the right mod, that's my honest opinion, you've jumped to conclusions.
Dioxin is harmless, especially in Ben and Jerry's ice cream: http://www.junkscience.com/foxnews/fn081800.html
It was the local chemical company—Monsanto—that first began the manufacture of polychlorbiphenyl in Anniston, Alabama—a type of process, we now know, that inevitably produces dioxin-like substances as well. And the first unwitting discovery that such materials create dangerous industrial hazards to chemical workers was made in the early 1930s when most of the workers in the Monsanto plant became sick.
From the same site you can find such material as "5 Fun Things You Can Do With Your Baby's Placenta"..
http://www.inhabitots.com/2010/07/12/5-fun-things-you-can-do-with-your-babys-placenta/funwplacenta1/?extend=1
1. It is the truth
2. It is the equivalent of calling a fat person "fat".
The truth is painful.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.