Dioxin: Things Are Worse Than You Thought

In June of 2000, following a decade of dithering, a scientific advisory panel, established by the US Environmental Protection Agency, acknowledged that many of the foods Americans eat are laced with an industrial toxin called dioxin. And, they acknowledged, dioxin causes cancer.

Now, eighteen months later, the committee's report lies gathering dust on EPA Administrator Christie Whitman's desk awaiting her final approval.

Between the time that the EPA panel of scientists acknowledged that food borne dioxins posed a risk to those of us in America who eat and the present state of dusty inertia on Administrator Whitman's desk scientists at the University of Texas added to the already mammoth body of dioxin damning science.

"Unfortunately, the level of dioxin in foods Americans currently eat is about the same as our earlier studies, but this study yields newer, nationwide data," said Arnold Schecter, M.D., professor of environmental sciences at the University of Texas-Houston School of Public Health http://www.sph.uth.tmc.edu in a May, 2001 press release regarding his teams research. "Even though the exposure is low-level, the levels of dioxin are higher than we had expected and don't show evidence of going down."

Fatty foods, including human mother's milk, are the greatest source of dioxins. That's because dioxins accumulate in the fatty tissue of animals. So, when you eat animal muscle or dairy products you get your daily dioxin dose. Schecter's team, which looked at 110 food samples gathered from across the United States, found that a non-animal based vegetarian diet had the least amount of dioxin. Farm raised fish, which had been fed food made from animal tissues, had the highest level of dioxin. Tissue from meat eating humans, one would presume, would have similar dioxin levels to those meat eating fish.

The EPA report notes that about 7 percent of daily cancer deaths in the US., or 100 out of 1,400, could be due to dioxin. According to the London-based Guardian newspaper, the EPA report concurs with a report released last year by a group of German scientists who concluded that dioxins could be responsible for 12 percent of human cancers in industrialized countries.

But cancer isn't the only risk posed by dioxins.

Children born to women exposed with higher levels of dioxin have been shown to have a lower IQ and behavioral problems. Dioxins are endocrine disrupters. That means they can act like hormones in the body, interfering with sexual development and causing infertility.

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