Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
... if the official dioxin-exposure limits are set unreasonably low, perhaps for political reasons unrelated to human or animal health.
people living in industrial countries are much more likely to get cancer.
And people in non-industrial societies have shorter life-spans. So your choice is to die from something other than cancer at a younger age, or live longer and die from cancer.
Another way to look at it is that we could cut the rate of cancer in industrial societies by euthanizing people at age 40.
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.
Except, here in the US (which is where babies are ingesting 1200 times the safe level of dioxin) we don't live as long as many other developed countries.
Maybe the solution is to simply make the US year 310 days long so we can live as many years as they do in other countries. That seems more reasonable than trying to lower environmental dioxin levels, after all. God forbid we should have to examine the consequences of our desire for cheap consumer goods.
We need to start a pro-dioxin public relations campaign in the Third World, so we can continue to have a place to manufacture those cheap consumer goods. They don't need long life-spans over there because who wants to live long in those nasty places anyway? We could say that dioxin makes you more virile or something. It worked for cigarettes.
You are welcome on my lawn.
euthanizing people at age 40
The cure for cancer!!
Except, here in the US (which is where babies are ingesting 1200 times the safe level of dioxin) we don't live as long as many other developed countries.
You can't make this statement without comparing infant/early-childhood mortality rates, as well as the different policies governments use to determine what a "live birth" actually means. Average lifespan is one of those statistics that becomes fuzzier and fuzzier the more you look at it.
Maybe the solution is to simply make the US year 310 days long so we can live as many years as they do in other countries. That seems more reasonable than trying to lower environmental dioxin levels, after all. God forbid we should have to examine the consequences of our desire for cheap consumer goods.
US life expectancy is 78.2 years. You're saying other countries life expectancy is 92 years? I think you're off by a bit. Japan, with the highest life expectancy in the world, is at 82.6 years. The UK is at 79.4 years. It's also interesting you vilify "cheap consumer goods". I didn't realize Herbicide was or was used to make consumer goods. Perhaps you should take a second look at the sources of dioxin?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
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.
Oh wow, you dug up exactly one statistic where the US is worse than a lot of countries.
Hey I have an idea... why don't you harp on that single number while ignoring how we are near the top on pretty much every other health metric. That's a winner.
You mean like cost?
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
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.
I'd settle for actual data. It's easy to post whatever BS you want on a blog. It's another thing entirely to have actual, verifiable data represented.
The fact that they are seemingly avoiding listing any data points sets off my BS alarm...
So, I looked at the ogranization that is making the claim: a lobbying organization, whose board is (and makes a point of noting is) comprised of activists, nearly all with political and social educations, not actual scientists.
I find that activists aren't noted for taking into account everything, but instead choose to cherry-pick facts that support their conclusion, and discard the rest. Much like climate change denialists or antivaxers.
I'd have less issue if the figure was coming from university labs, or government labs, and verified by peer review in a respected journal.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
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
This is why I fucking hate economists. PROTIP: Just because something is economically justified doesn't make it the right thing to do. Further, we only have the one planet and just because you'd be happy to live on a brown, smoggy barren dirtball where everyone dies of cancer at 50 doesn't mean everyone else wants to.
Even arguing from a strictly utilitarian point of view (IE yeah they'll live in a polluted shit-hole but atleast they'll be clawing their way up the economic ladder and so should experience a net gain in their standard of living) that argument completely ignores the possibility of developing clean, efficient alternatives and imposing much stricter standards wrt waste disposal where no such alternatives exist and using that clean industry to haul people out of poverty without fucking over the planet in the process.
I'd have to dig to find the links, so I'll throw this out knowing that some snarky SOB will just reply with "[Citation needed]"
Sweden didn't always have cradle-to-grave health insurance. In fact, they only got it some years after the US instituted Medicare/Medicaid.
The longevity delta from that point in history to today is (IIRC) within one month: Swedes lived longer before social medicine, and they live longer now too.
I would also note that it's asinine to point to "every other first world country" as if they all hew to the same social medicine model. You've got full on single payer,
nationalized health industries, price controlled private insurance, and nationalized health-insurance with public and private providers.*
For extra credit, please compare cohorts sharing a national origin: If the US system is so shitty, why do Americans of Japanese descent live to to the same age as Japanese living in Japan? You could also compare Scandinavians in the north central US to those in Europe. One dollar will get you ten that there's not a significant difference in longevity.
*I'm thinking of France, but maybe that's not the best way to describe it: They pay a significant tax that is what I would consider premiums, and then they
get reimbursed at some percentage of the government mandated charge for services performed.