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;
###
To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"unsubscribe sanet-mg". If you receive the digest format, use the command
"unsubscribe sanet-mg-digest".
To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"subscribe sanet-mg-digest".
All messages to sanet-mg are archived at:
http://www.sare.org/htdocs/hypermail