>Why should we worry about cancer-causing items? Already half,yes 50 %--1 in
2
>persons--in US have or will have cancer---already--so why worry? Just let
>every other person you know have cancer--will anyway--why worry? It is just
>part of life in the US, the greatest country in the world--never mind the
>cancer statistics--we have liberty. Yep, you have all the rights and
liberties
>in the world, to get cancer if you want it.
>
>Bunny Snow wrote:
>
>> Both the American Council for Science and Health and some the U.S.
>> mainstream media, I've found, are often misrepresenting studies and
>> continually reassuring falsehoods whenever potentially important
>> research has raised the concerns. I base my opinions on the
>> well-referenced research of the RACHELs and the Environmental Research
>> Foundation, as well as conferences attended, governmental and scientific
>> paper secured.
>>
>> RACHEL's newsletters are well-researched, well-written and well-edited
>> by Peter Montague, Ph.D., founder of the Environmental Research
>> Foundation, a non-profit, unbiased, citizen's advocacy organization. In
>> this and many other RACHEL's newsletters are references to the powerful
>> ACSH, which apparently receives industrial enterprise dollars to defend
>> any potential governmental, medical or judicial action in order to keep
>> the public confused, ignorant, and therefore controlled, so their
>> financial providers may continue unhindered.
>>
>> One only has to read through the publications of ACSH to better
>> understand which industry is providing their funding. In fact, when I
>> read that fluoride was good (despite the release of governmental
>> scientific funding to the contrary) and that eggs and cholesterol does
>> not contribute to heart disease, I wondered if these findings came from
>> ACSH. And, when I carefully read the misinterpretation of the endocrine
>> disruption studies, which ACSH has repeatedly called ''modulation'', I
>> knew that ACSH was making the studies say words that original published
>> studies and the government never used. In my believe, without going
>> into this word by word, it is totally misrepresentation of honest
>> scientists' work, which ACSH has spewed into the media to keep the
>> general public confused and ignorant.
>>
>> A Wall Street Journal editorial, for example, cited that dioxins are
>> natural and created in compost heaps. This is false. Dioxins, furans,
>> PCBs and other toxic unregulated wastes may be found in compost heaps,
>> if sewage (biosolids) or industrial sludge is used. Such wastes may
>> contain cement clinker, which is used to stabilize wastes or as a soil
>> additive. [See: Cement And Kiln Dust Contain Dioxins in RACHEL's #314.
>> The URL for the Environmental Research Foundation is
>> <http://www.rachel.org/home_eng.htm>.
>>
>> In my opinion, ''science and health'' are more lip service to the
>> industrial-funded scientists and policy makers at ACSH, the Wall Street
>> Journal, and other propaganda-spewing media, whose real purpose is to
>> protect ''corporate welfare''.
>>
>> BTW, I share this in full, so as not to take anything out of context,
>> unlike what ACSH and their followers so cleverly continues to do.
>> ~Bunny Snow
>> ______________________________________
>>
>> RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #656
>> ---June 24, 1999---
>> HEADLINES:
>> A CAMPAIGN OF REASSURING FALSEHOODS
>>
>> A Campaign of Reassuring Falsehoods
>>
>> Evidently the permanent government in the U.S. now sees dioxin in the
>> food supply as a threat to itself because it has begun a new campaign of
>> reassuring falsehoods, this time in the WALL STREET JOURNAL. We use the
>> term "permanent government" as it was described by Lewis Lapham, editor
>> of
>> HARPER'S MAGAZINE:
>>
>> "The permanent government, a secular oligarchy... comprises the Fortune
>> 500 companies and their attendant lobbyists, the big media and
>> entertainment syndicates, the civil and military services, the larger
>> research universities and law firms. It is this government that hires
>> the country's politicians and sets the terms and conditions under which
>> the country's citizens can exercise their right --God-given but
>> increasingly expensive --to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
>> Obedient to the rule of men, not laws, the permanent government oversees
>> the production of wealth, builds cities, manufactures goods, raises
>> capital, fixes prices, shapes the landscape, and reserves the right to
>> assume debt, poison rivers, cheat the customers, receive the gifts of
>> federal subsidy, and speak to the American people in the language of low
>> motive and base emotion."[1]
>>
>> Lapham distinguishes the "permanent government," which is not elected,
>> from the "provisional government," which is:
>>
>> "The provisional government is the spiritual democracy that comes and
>> goes on the trend of a political season and oversees the production of
>> pageants....Positing a rule of laws instead of men, the provisional
>> government must live within the cage of high-minded principle,
>> addressing its remarks to the imaginary figure known as the informed
>> citizen or the thinking man, a superior being who detests
>> superficial reasoning and quack remedies, never looks at PLAYBOY,
>> remembers the lessons of history, trusts Bill Moyers, worries about
>> political repression in Liberia, reads (and knows himself improved by)
>> the op-ed page of the WALL STREET JOURNAL," Lapham writes.
>>
>> * * *
>>
>> Starting in March, Belgian health authorities discovered dioxin and PCBs
>> in poultry, eggs, beef, pork, milk, butter and even in mayonnaise.
>> Dioxin and PCBs are members of a family of 219 toxic chemicals that can
>> damage the immune system and the hormones of humans and other animals.
>> They can also cause cancer, according to the World Health Organization.
>> [See REHW #636, #653.] The toxicity of dioxins and PCBs are reported in
>> "toxic equivalents" -- a toxicity reporting system that takes into
>> account the particular mixture of dioxins and PCBs that is being
>> measured.
>>
>> In late April, the Dutch Ministry of Health notified the Belgians that
>> they had measured dioxin in two chickens at 958 and 775 parts per
>> trillion toxic equivalents. In Belgium, the allowable limit for dioxin
>> in chicken is 5 ppt toxic equivalents, and in the U.S. the limit is one
>> ppt.[2]
>>
>> Still Belgian authorities said nothing publicly. Then in early June word
>> got out that Belgian foodstuffs were widely contaminated and the
>> European Union and the U.S. clapped a quarantine on foods from Belgium.
>> Other countries around the world immediately followed suit: Maylasia,
>> Myanmar, Uruguay, Thailand, Australia, Brazil, Russia, and China, among
>> others. Suddenly tons of food were pulled from shops throughout Belgium
>> and incinerated, leaving shelves bare. Within two weeks, the incident
>> had cost Belgian farmers, grocers and food exporters an estimated $500
>> million -- a lot of money in a small country.
>>
>> The problem was traced to 8 liters of oil containing PCBs contaminated
>> with 50 to 80 milligrams of dioxin. The British NEW SCIENTIST says "one
>> theory is" that the toxic oil was taken from an electrical transformer
>> and dumped illegally into a public recycling container for used frying
>> oil.[3] The contaminated oil ended up in an 88-ton (80 metric tonne)
>> batch of fat produced by Verkest, a company located near Ghent, Belgium.
>> The fat was sold to 12 manufacturers of animal feed, who then produced
>> 1760 tons (1600 metric tonnes) of contaminated animal feed. Starting in
>> January, 1999, the feed was sold mainly in Belgium but also in France
>> and the Netherlands.
>>
>> According to CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS, at a public hearing June 9, a
>> Dutch official said the problem had been solved in his country -- all of
>> the contaminated foods had been eaten. No one is sure how many people
>> were affected because no one is yet sure how widely the contaminated
>> feed was distributed. "Either a few people got a large dose, or many
>> people got a small dose," said Wim Traag from the Dutch State Institute
>> for Quality Control of Agricultural Products.
>>
>> The NEW SCIENTIST quoted Martin van der Berg from the University of
>> Utrecht who calculated that adults who ate chicken and eggs contaminated
>> at 900 ppt would take in 100 times the amount considered "safe" by the
>> World Health Organization.
>>
>> A 3-year-old child eating a single egg contaminated at 900 ppt toxic
>> equivalents would increase his or her total body burden of dioxin
>> equivalents by 20%, van der Berge calculated. He said this would
>> probably not be enough to cause cancer in humans "but could affect
>> neural and cognitive development, the immune system, and thyroid and
>> steroid hormones, especially in unborn and young children,"
>> the NEW SCIENTIST reported.
>>
>> Two weeks into the crisis, on June 13, the Belgian government suffered a
>> massive defeat in elections. The next day the WALL STREET JOURNAL
>> announced the debacle this way: "The center-left coalition of Prime
>> Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene suffered a devastating defeat in national
>> elections Sunday, punished for its handling of a food contamination
>> scandal...." Mr. Dehaene promptly resigned.
>>
>> Clearly, the political hazards of a dioxin-contaminated food supply were
>> not lost on the permanent government in the U.S. Less than a week after
>> the initial revelations about dioxin in Belgian foods, the WALL STREET
>> JOURNAL began a campaign of disinformation.
>>
>> On June 7, the JOURNAL had one of its staff reporters, Stephen D. Moore,
>> try to reassure its readers under the headline, "Dioxins' Risk to Humans
>> is Difficult to Appraise."[4]
>>
>> The opening paragraph of the story did not mention that dioxins are
>> toxic; it said dioxins are created by many industrial processes but also
>> "in compost heaps." How could anyone develop a healthy respect for a
>> chemical that originates in a pile of lawn clippings? No one fears the
>> familiar. Very effective propaganda.
>>
>> In the second paragraph, the JOURNAL introduced the idea that dioxins
>> are toxic: "While there are dozens of different dioxins and furans, a
>> closely related family of molecules, only about a half-dozen are toxic."
>> Not true, but effective propaganda nevertheless.
>>
>> Then the real point of Mr. Moore's work unfolds: a re-telling of the
>> story of the 1976 accident at a Hoffman-LaRoche pesticide factory in
>> Seveso, Italy, which spewed dioxin into the surrounding community. "At
>> Seveso, a cloud of chemicals containing dioxin was released into the air
>> and eventually contaminated an area of 15 square kilometers with a
>> population of 37,000 people," the JOURNAL said.
>>
>> And what happened to these 37,000 people? The JOURNAL now quotes Roche,
>> the company that caused the accident: 447 citizens of Seveso "developed
>> skin injuries that healed within a few weeks." And, "Another 193 people,
>> mainly children, developed cases of chloracne, a condition characterized
>> by dark skin blotches, that take months or even years to disappear." And
>> that's the extent of it. In the next sentence, the JOURNAL assures us
>> that dioxin caused no permanent injuries at Seveso: "The Italian
>> government has conducted studies of longer-term effects from the Seveso
>> accident. At least so far, there's no evidence of any significant
>> increase of miscarriages or cancer among local residents." Very
>> reassuring, but completely untrue.
>>
>> Actually, the Italian government's chief researcher, Pier Alberto
>> Bertazzi, has published a series of studies in peer-reviewed journals,
>> beginning in 1993, showing that many people exposed to dioxins at Seveso
>> have suffered a variety of serious long-term effects including increased
>> incidence of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, including cancers of
>> the stomach and rectum, leukemias (cancer of the blood- forming
>> cells), Hodgkin's disease, and soft tissue sarcomas.[5]-8
>>
>> Now the JOURNAL returns to the theme that dioxins are natural: "Dioxins
>> also can come from natural sources. One contamination case in the U.S. a
>> few years ago resulted from the use of clay as a binder in chicken
>> feed. American regulators eventually traced the contaminated clay to a
>> quarry in the state of Arkansas and established that the source of the
>> dioxins was prehistoric." [See REHW #555.] In actual fact, American
>> regulators did no such thing -- they never did figure out where that
>> dioxin came from -- but this is unvarnished propaganda, and effective as
>> such.
>>
>> Evidently not satisfied with this series of misrepresentations, the WALL
>> STREET JOURNAL on June 21 turned over its editorial page to Elizabeth
>> Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health, a
>> scheme-tank supported by the chemical industry. Ms. Whelan is, frankly,
>> one of the crudest and most shameless dissemblers of our time. She
>> launched her career as lapdog of the permanent government by falsifying
>> the history of Alar, the cancer-causing farm chemical that used to be
>> found in apple juice intended for babies in the U.S., before the apple
>> industry came to its senses and swore off the poison in 1989. [See REHW
>> #530-535.]
>>
>> In the WALL STREET JOURNAL June 21, Ms. Whelan assured her readers that
>> ''there was no evidence" of "health-threatening toxic materials" in
>> Belgian food. Oh? This is because, she says, "no one has ever died or
>> become chronically ill due to environmental exposure [to dioxin]." Oh?
>> The problem in Belgium is Belgium's "unnnecessarily stringent laws," Ms.
>> Whelan asserts.
>>
>> The dioxin problem in Belgium was imaginary, Ms. Whelan assures us. It
>> "can be explained as an example of hysterical contagion," Ms. Whelan
>> asserts. She then waxes academic, quoting a college professor who says
>> mass hysterias have been recorded throughout European history. On this
>> basis, Ms. Whelan concludes that the fear of dioxin in Belgium is just
>> like the Alar episode in the U.S. in 1989 -- a make-believe problem.
>>
>> It is interesting to us that the permanent government has to rely on
>> such crude misrepresentations to reassure its loyal followers in the
>> business community (those who read the op-ed page of the WALL STREET
>> JOURNAL and know themselves improved by it). To us it means that the
>> anti-dioxin campaign being conducted by grass-roots activists in the
>> U.S. [see REHW #479] is having a good effect. No doubt the permanent
>> government has reason to be nervous: they have contaminated the U.S.
>> food supply with dangerous levels of dioxins and, as the Bible says, the
>> truth will set people free. [See REHW #414, #463, #636.]
>>
>> --Peter Montague(National Writers Union,
>> UAW Local 1981/AFL-CIO)
>>
>> =====
>>
>> [1] Lewis H. Lapham, "Lights, Camera, Democracy!" HARPER'S MAGAZINE
>> August 1996, pgs. 33-38, quoted with permission.
>>
>> [2] Bette Hileman, "Belgium has a problem: Dioxin-tainted food,"
>> CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS June 14, 1999, pg. 9.
>>
>> [3] Debora MacKenzie, "Recipe for disaster," NEW SCIENTIST No. 2190
>> (June 12, 1999), pg. 4.
>>
>> [4] Craig R. Whitney, "Food Scandal Adds to Belgium's Image of
>> Disarray," NEW YORK TIMES June 9, 1999, pg. A4.
>>
>> [5] Pier Alberto Bertazzi and others, "Cancer Incidence in a Population
>> Accidentally Exposed to 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-PARA-dioxin,"
>> EPIDEMIOLOGY Vol. 4 (September, 1993), pgs. 398-406.
>>
>> [6] P.A. Bertazzi, "The Seveso studies on early and long-term effects of
>> dioxin exposure: a review," ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH PERSPECTIVES Vol. 106
>> Supplement 2 (April 1998), pgs. 625-633.
>>
>> [7] P.A. Bertazzi and others, "Dioxin exposure and cancer risk: a 15-
>> year mortality study after the 'Seveso accident,'" EPIDEMIOLOGY Vol. 8,
>> No. 6 (November 1997), pgs. 646-652.
>>
>> [8] A.C. Pesatori and others, "Dioxin exposure and non-malignant health
>> effects: a mortality study," OCCUPATIONAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL MEDICINE
>> Vol. 55, No. 2 (February 1998), pgs. 126-131.
>>
>> Descriptor terms: dioxin; food safety; belgium;
>>
>> ###
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