The following is extremely important
reading that you may want to forward. It is long, but worth your
time. Shockingly, unfortunately, and shamefully, this information is not
the kind of thing you find circulating in the mainstream media -- your TV, your
newspaper, your radio news report. Why? Read on to find out.
Yes, you have a right to be pissed.
PolySciFi-451
After 14 years,
the EPA is set to release its reassessment of dioxin's toxicity. What it says
comes as no big surprise.
By Eric Francis
Planet Waves Digital
Media
It is the government report that would not die, and which has yet
to be officially born. Its latest "preliminary draft edition" is still being
held under wraps by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But the
Clinton administration, after 14 years of federal stonewalling, botched
coverups, conflicts of interest and manufactured controversy -- and nearly
half-a-century of corporate efforts to hide the truth -- appears poised to admit
what everyone seems to have always known. Dioxin, a toxin so potent that it
killed all of the rats in one study at a concentration of just five
parts-per-trillion in their food, causes cancer and other severe, adverse health
effects in people.
In case you are inclined to think this puts dioxin in
the category of, say, an artificial sweetener that you have to feed to rats by
the kilo to see an effect, consider this. The EPA's report, due out in June,
confirms, based on its earlier drafts, that dioxins are already found in our
human bodies at about five parts-per-trillion or more, levels now understood to
trigger numerous diseases with no added exposure. The levels that exist in the
body are present because dioxins are found throughout the food supply,
particularly in meat, poultry, fish, dairy and eggs, where they concentrate in
fats. Dioxin exposure is cumulative, with each daily dose adding to what is
already there, then working in concert with many other, similar toxins also
moving in the food chain.
All of this has been known for years. But until
now, there has always been a measure of "plausible deniability" by industry
because, in the face of seemingly conflicting science, none of it was ever
actually confirmed by the government.
So daunting is the prospect of
these facts being given any more official credibility than they already have
that a group of 20,000 New York State restaurant owners, represented by a
prominent rubber and cigarette industry lobbyist named Jim Tozzi, has filed a
federal lawsuit to block a related federal report that calls dioxin a known
human carcinogen. The suit charges that, should this information receive the
blessings of the federal government, people will be too terrified of dioxin to
eat food. This, they contend, will hurt the restaurants' business.
In the
macabre history of dioxin, such a move is typical, for it is a tale in the genre
of political science fiction that has wended its way through the aftermath
dozens of disasters and their resulting lawsuits, citizen movements and a haze
of fraud and scientific chaos that have revealed that the environmental
regulatory process is a kind of surreal farce.
Waste Products of
Industry
Officially called 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin, or
TCDD, dioxin and its hundreds of chemical cousins are born as waste by-products
of a variety of chemical industry operations, all of which use chlorine. The
tire business, paper, electrical, plastic, wood preserving and trash
incineration industries are just a few. They are also formed in chemical and
electrical accidents, such as the 1991 transformer explosions at the State
University of New York at New Paltz, and were present in PCB oil that was dumped
for 40 years into the Hudson River by General Electric. Yet many so-called
"dioxin-like compounds," including unburned PCBs and a variety of pesticides,
have been manufactured intentionally through most of the 20th century, and many
are still in production in the US and abroad. In recent years, due to sloppy
manufacturing and overuse of chlorinated products, dioxins have turned up in
everything from pHisohex antibacterial soap to Lysol brand disinfectant, both of
which are used in surgical facilities, in households, and even on children and
their toys.
In addition to being carcinogenic, dioxin is the most potent
known cancer promoter, weakening the body's immune defenses and allowing many
other substances to act as carcinogens when they would not ordinarily do so.
Many types of dioxins are found in human milk, and some of the highest doses
received in life are transmitted from the mother to the infant during breast
feeding.
Very small amounts of the substance cause serious problems. Last
year in Belgium, for example, a mere 80 milligrams of dioxin, enough to fit in a
small pill, accidentally disseminated through the food chain and contaminated
many tons of food and livestock, all of which had to be destroyed after being
distributed throughout Europe and the United States.
There is more
evidence of how little has really changed in more than three decades of struggle
over this issue. The first public dioxin crisis, which surfaced in 1969,
involved Agent Orange, a chemical used to strip the leaves off of trees in
Vietnam. Millions of Vietnamese people and US troops were exposed, many became
sick, and the children of thousands experienced birth defects and childhood
reproductive cancers. Agent Orange was composed of two components: 2,4,5-T,
which was finally banned because it contained dioxin, and 2,4-D, which is still
on the market despite the fact that one of every three samples of the product is
known to be tainted with dioxin. 2,4-D is readily available today as a weed
killer in many lawn fertilizers, with no warning on the package. Which brands
are contaminated? Federal officials say it's a trade secret, and will not reveal
the information to citizens.
Yet even if it knew these facts, the public
could hardly be in a position to demand action. News reports over the past 10
years have alternately called dioxin the most toxic poison known to science
(it's 11,000 times more toxic than cyanide when tested on guinea pigs), or
something as harmless as sunbathing (according to The New York Times), or a
substance that harms only animals but by the mercy of nature, is benign to
humans (according to earlier, manipulated EPA assessments and many other
sources). These contradictory facts served to create chaos even in the highest
echelons of the scientific community. But the latest draft of the EPA's long
study on dioxin, which has never been officially released to the public, would
settle all of that.
Paper Industry Pressure
Known over the
years as the "EPA reassessment of dioxin's toxicity," the project dates back
nearly a generation, to 1986, when it became public knowledge that dioxin is
contained in paper pulp and mill discharges, which flow into rivers, oceans and
hence marine life and the fish supply. Lawsuits were brought against Champion
and other paper manufacturers, alleging that they were intentionally killing the
people who ate fish downstream from their plants, most of them poor Native
Americans. In response to this crisis, the paper industry pressured the federal
government to reassess all known dioxin data, in hopes that it would turn out to
be less toxic than it was shown to be in the past.
But as the latest
facts came in, the opposite turned out to be true. Extensive research has shown
that present background levels of dioxin currently found in the human body of
average people -- accumulated from years of eating contaminated food -- are
already at levels high enough to cause reproductive diseases, hormone
disturbances and other effects that may lead to birth defects, cancer and a wide
variety of other ills.
Over the years, portions or entire drafts of the
several thousand page report have been released for review by EPA, but always
with the words, "DRAFT -- DO NOT CITE OR QUOTE" printed on every page. Despite
unimaginable pressure from industry to kill the project or to distort its
findings, the reassessment miraculously survived the Reagan, Bush and Clinton
administrations, which packed federal agencies with former corporate executives
who were in the position of regulating the industries in which they had direct
interests.
Yet the reassessment also survived:
* A now
carefully-documented paper industry coverup by Vernon Houk, then an assistant
surgeon general, which set the stage for wide-scale denial of the dangers of
dioxin in paper pulp and mill discharge by the press and industry;
* A
related public relations campaign of stunning proportions through the mid-1990s,
with prominent page-one article series in both The New York Times and The Los
Angeles Times, as well as in papers across the nation, presenting to the public
the made-up story, originating with Houk and The New York Times reporter Keith
Schneider, that "dioxin is less toxic than previously believed." This claim was
finally exposed as false by Vicki Monks in a landmark June 1994 article in
American Journalism Review;
* The publication of three cancer mortality
studies on Monsanto workers badly contaminated in a 1949 chemical disaster,
which are now widely understood to be made-up. These manipulated studies showed
that dioxin exposure does not cause cancer, and were sponsored and supported by
Monsanto scientists. Published in leading journals such as the Journal of the
American Medical Association, the studies created significant confusion
throughout the reassessment process, impacting other EPA regulations of dioxin
as well;
* A libel lawsuit brought by a Monsanto scientist involved with
those studies against Peter Montague, one of the few journalists who was willing
to report the truth about scientific fraud
surrounding dioxin. The lawsuit
succeeded only at terrifying the world media away from covering the issue;
*
A well-documented campaign of harassment by the EPA against one of its
scientists, Dr. Cate Jenkens, who was blowing the whistle on Monsanto's
scientific fraud surrounding dioxin;
* Fires in the homes of the two most
effective citizen collectors of dioxin documents, Pat Costner of Greenpeace
(author of We All Live Downstream), and Carol van Strum (author of A Bitter
Fog), which destroyed their collections and, in van Strum's case, took the lives
of her four children.
Yet the end, 14 years into the reassessment process
and half a century after the discovery of dioxin, we are about to be told by the
EPA reassessment the plainly obvious, that dioxin
is
carcinogenic.
"How ridiculous," commented van Strum last
week. "And to think that they are still calling this report a 'draft', when they
have been fully aware of this problem for decades. The problem here is that we
have the federal government investigating dioxin when it has a clear conflict of
interest because of the Agent Orange problem. It's been in a position where it
cannot admit the obvious because this will be used against it in
lawsuits."
Industry's Early Knowledge Documented
Industry, as
well, has been operating with full knowledge of the problem for many years. In
an internal Monsanto memo dated March 17, 1965, the company's then-medical
director, Emmett Kelly -- warning his own company's scientists who would be
handling a sample -- that Dow Chemical Co. feels that dioxin "is the most toxic
compound they have ever experienced." Then, two weeks later he admits in another
internal memo, "very conceivably, it can be a potent carcinogen."
This
direct admission from a high level official, one of many discovered the Monsanto
and Dow files through lawsuits against the companies, was made 16 years after a
chemical disaster at Monsanto's Agent Orange factory at Nitro, West Virginia.
The 1949 Nitro event marks the beginnings of the full understanding of the scope
of the dioxin problem, as well as the genesis of the false science that has
characterized the issue and forestalled effective regulations. Hundreds of
Monsanto's workers were exposed when a 2,4,5-T reactor exploded, spewing the
partially-brewed herbicide throughout the building and into the surrounding
environment, along with extremely high levels of dioxin. Many of the workers
died of cancer, though even the real number of cancer deaths is likely to be
underestimated because it does not include people who died of dioxin-induced
heart disease before their cancer could be diagnosed.
Kelly, Monsanto's
medical director, had occasion to comment on dioxin toxicity seven years later
after a similar accident occurred at a BASF (Badische Co.) factory in Germany.
He said that photographs of the worst BASF cases showed symptoms similar to
those in Monsanto workers -- "horrible skin eruptions with nearly blister-like
welts and some ulcerations where infection ensued... [I]n addition to skin
manifestations, their men reported all the same symptoms as experienced in our
workers, i.e., fatigue, vertigo, loss of libido, painful joints,
etc."
Kelly said that after the initial cleanup of the BASF scene,
rabbits were exposed in open wire cages to the former production area. The
rabbits died one week later, and autopsies showed liver necrosis, or the
presence of dead flesh on the organ. He wrote that a BASF scientist first
considered that there might be a virus of some kind present, and placed new
rabbits in the same cages, though without bringing the cages to the cleanup
site. Those rabbits also died of liver necrosis within 1-2 weeks. There was no
virus, just dioxin.
In his June 12, 1956 memo, Kelly draws a picture of a
molecule almost identical to dioxin (dibenzofuran, the most potent dioxin- like
compound), and writes, "This impurity can show up in the production of any
chlorinated phenols and is probably responsible" for the symptoms associated
with other chlorinated chemicals, such as PCBs, wood preservatives and others.
Manufacture of these chemicals proceeded unchecked over the decades; PCBs,
finally banned in 1978, were one of Monsanto's highest profit-makers, and the
company fought a brutal war with regulators to keep them on the market before
they were finally outlawed by Congress.
Meanwhile, exposed Nitro workers
were tracked over the years by Monsanto scientist Raymond Suskind, a medical
doctor, who first examined the victims at the time of the explosion. Then,
between 1978 and 1979, Suskind analyzed the health effects and death rates among
these workers, and his three studies were released between 1980 and 1984,
credited to different authors, all of which concluded that dioxin exposure does
not cause cancer. These studies, which were later found to contain manipulated
data hiding the real number of cancer deaths, were released to the public in the
midst of three major dioxin issues which were at the time dominating headlines:
the Vietnam veterans lawsuits over Agent Orange, the Love Canal disaster near
Niagara Falls, NY, and the contamination and evacuation of Times Beach, Mo.,
which was purchased in its entirety and demolished by the federal government
after dioxin waste was sprayed on the roads and corrals to keep dust
down.
Thus, with dioxin raging in the news, the data seemed to prove
neither Monsanto nor any other chemical maker had culpability. According to EPA
documents, the studies were relied upon for creating federal dioxin regulations,
including the denial of benefits to Vietnam veterans.
One of the reports
on Monsanto workers, called the "Zack-Gaffey study" after the scientists whose
names appeared on it, was used by Monsanto to support a direct 1980 claim that
exposure to its Agent Orange product does not cause cancer.
"Monsanto
Company today reported that no apparent relationship exists between TCDD, the
toxic dioxin contaminant in 'Agent Orange', and the cause of death of 58
employees exposed in the 1949 Nitro incident, the company said in a statement,"
in the wording of a news release. The study, credited to a scientist not
publicly known to work for Monsanto -- Dr. William Gaffey -- was published as
his independent work in the journal Environmental Science Research. The other
two studies also received high-credibility publication, one of which appeared in
the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Had the raw data been
reported and interpreted correctly, according to independent scientists who have
reviewed it more recently, there would have been a clear demonstration that the
exposed Monsanto workers had higher-than-normal rates of cancer. And since the
studies looked only at the officially-reported cause of death and did not
determine the presence of cancer by autopsy, it is likely that many cancer cases
were missed.
From this point forward, industry went on the offensive.
With these studies firmly in the public record, it became impossible ever to
state unequivocally that dioxin was a known human
carcinogen. Combined with
an overall lack of available data -- in part caused by the fact that dioxin
cancers develop over many years, and that there are not many human populations
with
specific, measurable exposures to study -- industry could always either
raise a cloud of confusion, or fall back on the idea that animal data, though
abundant in dioxin's case, is not a valid indicator of cancer in humans. Indeed,
dioxin has caused cancer in every animal it's ever been tested on.
But
today, with the EPA poised to admit the obvious, many people and agencies who
could hide in the shadows of uncertainty will have to face a simple
fact.
And yet fifty years after the Nitro accident, the shadow of the
manipulated studies on Monsanto workers hangs over the issue. Bill Kelly, a
spokesman for Jim Tozzi, the lobbyist representing 20,000 New York
restaurants suing the federal government to block the release of a federal
report, used the confusion over human cancer data this week to justify the
restaurants' lawsuit.
"The basis of the suit is simply that the agency
proposed to upgrade dioxin in violation of its own definition or criteria for
the 'known' [human carcinogen] category. It has previously been classified as a
'reasonably anticipated [human] carcinogen'. And the odd thing is there is no
new human data."++
___________________________
Eric Francis has
covered dioxins and related issues for nine years. His work has appeared in
Sierra, The Village Voice, The Las Vegas Sun and in other
periodicals.