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."

Comments

Screw dioxin

[by (1706743)]

It's the dihydrogen monoxide that's killing us.

Re:Screw dioxin

[w0mprat]

I tried to cut down, now it's the C2H5OH that's killing me.

Re:Screw dioxin

[TubeSteak]

It's the dihydrogen monoxide that's killing us.

Why do you think I only drink distilled grain alcohol?
God willing, we will prevail in peace and freedom from dioxins and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids

Re:Screw dioxin

[Anonymous Coward]

What proof do you have of that?

1200 times safe level?

[LordKronos]

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.

Re:1200 times safe level?

[jd]

Not necessarily. It depends on how "safe" is defined. If "unsafe" means that you can expect a statistically measurable drop in life expectancy and measurable increase in related illnesses over a lifetime of exposure (ie: pretty much the same case as you have for smoking-related illnesses), then you would not necessarily have an obviously sick population even though said population was, indeed, sick - merely not sick enough for it to be visible at that time.

Lifetime exposure is one factor. Yearly exposure and daily exposure are other measures. I don't know exactly which of these the 1200x refers to. It matters. It matters a lot. You can't simply assume that exposure is utterly uniform and devoid of any fluctuation, nor can you assume that accumulation is also uniform and devoid of any fluctuation. Thus, the 1200x may well be an average that never actually happens, but where you are very likely to get millions of times safe levels for brief periods of times at intervals in your life. Or it might be that 1200x is the maximum value that the fluctuations are likely to reach, or it might be the root-mean-square value of the fluctuating values, or any number of other things. The summary is useless (as usual) in understanding what the numbers mean.

Or maybe 1200x is not actually the exposure level at all, but rather the peak value observed for bodily accumulation of the toxin. Or the average. Or the root-mean-square. Or some other statistical value.

Regardless, the EPA is usually wildly optimistic - the EU generally permits levels only half the EPA estimates of what is safe, and the value is generally much closer to the value considered sensible by environmental chemists and inorganic biochemists. Both the EPA and EU values are usually also much lower than the values industry will stomach, with the result that either the law is widely flouted (since jobs = votes and nobody is stupid enough to vote themselves out of office by risking jobs through environmental crackdowns) or the law is widely bypassed by moving the most polluting component(s) to places like Bhopal, where the people are too poor or too dead to complain.

(I don't know what the solution is, but since a company pays for whatever it wastes, it would seem to follow that the less you waste the more you make.)

Re:1200 times safe level?

[grcumb]

That said, I agree that the "1200 times safe levels" quote is fear-mongering. Humans are notoriously bad at judging relative risk (see the Bad Science blog for more).

From the WHO site:

• Dioxins are a group of chemically-related compounds that are persistent environmental pollutants.
• Dioxins are found throughout the world in the environment and they accumulate in the food chain, mainly in the fatty tissue of animals.
• More than 90% of human exposure is through food, mainly meat and dairy products, fish and shellfish. Many national authorities have programmes in place to monitor the food supply.
• Dioxins are highly toxic and can cause reproductive and developmental problems, damage the immune system, interfere with hormones and also cause cancer.
• Due to the omnipresence of dioxins, all people have background exposure, which is not expected to affect human health. However, due to the highly toxic potential of this class of compounds, efforts need to be undertaken to reduce current background exposure.
• Prevention or reduction of human exposure is best done via source-directed measures, i.e. strict control of industrial processes to reduce formation of dioxins as much as possible.

In short, dioxins' real danger is not increased cancer risk in the population that ingests it directly. It's the mutagenic risk to our offspring. In layman's terms, you're not going to die of cancer, but your child might be born with a genetic defect that affects their ability to thrive - or maybe even to survive.

A 'safe' dose is therefore difficult to quantify, because we won't know for sure what the impact will be after (for example) 3 generations of exposure at a given level. More to the point, we don't want to find out by waiting to see if our predictions were right. In cases like this, the precautionary principle is by far the better choice.

That's difficult to apply, however, because dioxins are persistent chemicals; they accumulate in the food chain and don't disperse easily. Arguably, there is no such thing as a 'safe' level, because with the passage of time even small annual increments become very large numbers.

As with climate change, decisions deriving from the scientific findings will be largely informed by the moral/ethical/philosophical stance of the policy-makers. The same data set looks very different if you're looking at the problem in terms of the next electoral cycle, as opposed to the next generation.

Screw Dioxin!

[CajunArson]

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!

Re:Great

[oldspewey]

But if they change the formula for calculating safe dosages, they can show fewer bars on the display and people will at least feel better about their dioxin exposure.

Re:Great

[nacturation]

But if they change the formula for calculating safe dosages, they can show fewer bars on the display and people will at least feel better about their dioxin exposure.

It's also recommended that infants hold breasts with their left hand.

Re:Kind of makes you wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nine animal studies conducted between 1973 and 2008 show that dioxin is harmful at levels even lower than in the human studies on which EPA based its proposal. Those human studies, conducted in 2008, explored the toxic legacy of a 1976 chemical plant explosion in Seveso, Italy, which exposed thousands of people to dioxin in unprecedented intensity and left large quantities of the chemical in the soil." source: http://www.ewg.org/dioxin/home

of course ... those studies could have all been flawed ... but ... it's a much more likely possibility that the cancer all the people you know that have cancer comes from something related to their lifetime of high exposures to environmental pollutants.

EWR's press release

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Kind of makes you wonder...

[Cedric Tsui]

I don't think so.
This is a common problem in terms of safety standards. Toxicity of a substance is very hard to quantify. It's easy to take a group of lab rats and see what dosage kills half of them. But what does that say about how tiny amounts of the substance will affect your lifetime chance of developing cancer? Usually, you cant say anything!

If it can't be quantified, then you assume the worst case scenario. I know that when it comes to radiation, we call this the 'linear, no threshold' (LNT) model. If x amount will bring you 50% of the way to death, then x/500 will bring you 0.1% of the way to death. There is no safety threshold, which means that we assume that any ingested amount no matter how small does damage.

Now, the LNT model is pretty much never correct. At least, I've never seen an example where it has held. One example: Swallowing two pounds of vitamin C should kill me based on the LD50 for rats. If we were to apply the LNT model, we'd conclude that vitamin C is toxic and I shouldn't ingest any if I can help it. It's this kind of reasoning why lexan bottles are no longer covering the shelves. Some scientist measured 6-20 parts per billion of BPA in the water contained in one of these bottles.

Does that mean the EPA is unreasonably over protective? Yes. Do I want them to change? ABSOLUTELY NOT! In this case, as in the case for radiation, and for BPA, pseudo estrogen, mercury, etc.., is that we can not prove that exposure to these quantities is safe, and we have reason to believe that they are not. They do not need to be proven dangerous to be banned. They need to be proven safe to NOT be banned.

Re:so.....

[Man On Pink Corner]

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.

Re:so.....

[Ironsides]

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?

Re:White Cardboard.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"Bleach" is usually Sodium Hypochlorite, in water solution. Historically, both Sodium Hypochlorite and elemental Chlorine, among others, would have been used at various stages of the pulp bleaching process. Unfortunately, a number of organochlorine compounds are pretty nasty customers(dioxins hog the stage time; but furans, PCBs, and others are also not exactly tasty treats), and using Chlorine to attack wood pulp, full of various organic compounds, produces nice white wood pulp, and a bunch of organochlorine compounds(even if the cardboard isn't going into food packaging, these tend to end up going more or less straight into the river).

The almost-as-cheap-and-somewhat-less-dangerous method substitutes chlorine dioxide for straight chlorine. Apparently, this reduces the amount of exciting organochlorines in the result.

The more costly; but chlorine free, technique involves Ozone(the same applies in water treatment plants). The nice thing about Ozone is that it is pretty close to Chlorine in terms of being a vociferous oxidizing and bleaching agent that is soluble in water; but that it consists entirely of oxygen atoms, and is fairly unstable. This means that you can have a ghastly disinfecting or bleaching agent that, after 24-48 hours of sitting around, is pretty much just plain water with dissolved oxygen.

The chlorine-free methods are particularly popular in Europe, and they've reduced the output of Chlorinated nasties pretty much everywhere; but the odds are still pretty good that, unless specifically stated otherwise and in the EU, your white paper is white because of a chlorine process.

Re:Great

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The safe exposure limit has two major uses:

One, it directly informs industrial hygiene standards for workers exposed to it on the job. OSHA recommendations/requirements will(possibly some decades after the fact, The Business of America is Business(tm) after all) reflect the levels of exposure that are permissible, given the expected health effects.

Two, it informs environmental regulations related to the discharge of the chemicals in question. Dioxins are only "unavoidable" today because their release has historically been alarmingly close to unregulated, and they are fairly persistent little critters. If the safe exposure limit is revised downward, acceptable release limits will(again, possibly with substantial lag, nobody wants to make the American Chemistry Council cry) will be revised downward, so that, as the compounds eventually are degraded or encapsulated, exposures will fall.

Re:Great

[oldspewey]

What are you, a Japanese porn director?

Re:so.....

[AlamedaStone]

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?

let's look at the research

[simula]

I am extremely dubious that your anecdote is truthful. All the current research points to exactly the opposite of what you describe.

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:

• Effect of a phytoestrogen food supplement on reproductive health in normal males

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:

• Soy protein formulas in children: no hormonal effects in long-term feeding.
• Exposure to Soy-Based Formula in Infancy and Endocrinological and Reproductive Outcomes in Young Adulthood
• Safety of Soy-Based Infant Formulas Containing Isoflavones: The Clinical Evidence

Dioxin Toxicity

[WebSorcerer]

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.

• There are many chlorinated dioxins, but only a few are toxic; the ones with chlorine in the 2,3,7, and 8 positions.
• If an animal is exposed to a wide range of dioxin isomers (such as fly ash from combustion), the body retains and concentrates the toxic isomers in fatty tissues. This implies that there is a receptor which binds the 2,3,7,8-dioxin isomers. This receptor has another purpose, but the dioxin molecule happens to fit.
• The bioconcentration factor in fish is approximately 3000 (the fish end up with 3000 times more dioxin than the water they live in).
• Dioxin acute toxicity (high single doses) is very species dependent. e.g. Mice are more sensitive than rats, and man is on the low end of the sensitivity scale.
• Long term low level exposure produces an increased risk for some kinds of cancers, and affects the immune system.
• All humans have a natural low level of dioxins (generally less than 1 part per trillion).

My dioxin web site

Re:Dioxin Toxicity

[WebSorcerer]

Since man (and every other animal) has had dioxin in their system at very low levels during their evolution, these low levels are natural to the species. However, the ambient levels of dioxin have risen in recent time due to the activities of man, in most part due to combustion processes. No studies that I know of have addressed whether this has had a deleterious effect and if so, to what extent. Common sense, however, tells me that it probably is not a good thing.

To reduce ambient levels would require either curtailing man-made combustion, or treating all man-made combustion products before they are emitted. I don't think this is a possibility in the near future. However, the efforts to curtail global warming are a step in the right direction, IMHO.

Fortunately, plants to not take up dioxins. I was involved in an early study to determine this. We synthesized radiolabeled tetrachlorodioxin for the US Department of Agriculture for use in a study they did on uptake of dioxins in several plants. Since the analytical methods did not exist at that time to chemically determine dioxins at low levels, they could track the radioactivity to find the answer. They found that corn kernels, for example, contained no detectable dioxin. Root plants, however, had dioxin on the surface of the roots which could be washed off. My advice is to thoroughly wash root vegetables before eating.

Since animals bio-concentrate dioxins they are exposed to, limiting certain of these in the diet would be beneficial. Fish live in water which contains dioxins at very low levels. Their bodies trap a portion of them in their fatty tissues raising the level in their bodies about a factor of 3000. This takes time. Fish which are long-lived in general contain higher levels of dioxin. The US government has advisories on certain waterways against eating more than a specified number of fish per month. Also, large game fish likely have higher levels. Plant-eating animals are not exposed to equivalent levels of dioxin.

There have been several incidences of animals being contaminated with dioxins due to contaminated food. One incident mentioned in the comments above was chicken found to be contaminated with dioxin during a routine food analysis supermarket survey by the US government. The source of the contamination was due to the presence of contaminated clay which is put in the food to facilitate its ability to flow easily in the machinery which transfers it (usually via augers) from place to place during the feed's manufacture.

I was involved as a consultant to a Houston law firm in the litigation surrounding this incident. The clay contamination was of natural origin. Clay is made during the deposition of silt in lakes. It is thus stratified and can act as a 'time machine' for determining substances in the water at the time of the deposit by analyzing core samples. The deeper the sample, the older it is, and the time period can be back to prehistoric ages. The pattern of dioxins in the clay, mined from a depth of about 30 feet, was unusual. It did not match any known source.

It was found that a species of algae could manufacture dioxins. The algae were deposited, along with the silt, in a layer 30 feet below the top of the clay deposit. Since the contamination was of natural origin, and the possibility that clay could be contaminated in this way was was unknown, there was no culpable party, and the law suits evaporated. We are fortunate that our government had the foresight to monitor the food we eat for dioxin contamination.

Personally, I do not worry about dioxins in my diet. Man has evolved in the presence of dioxins and can handle the 'normal' exposure encountered in his daily life. What the government study is trying to do is to determine the level of concern for unusual exposure to dioxins. This, in turn, allows them to control the populace's exposure to dangerous levels of dioxins.

I hope this answers your questions.

If you want daily updates about dioxins try Google News

Re:so.....

[darthdavid]

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.

Re:so.....

[coredog64]

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.