Dioxins in Irish pork are really PCBs

Hi, it’s your old friend Eric here…coming up from air from the annual edition.

I’ve been late getting onto the Irish pork story, you know, the dioxins that they found. Finally an article sent to me tonight by Carol van Strum, my mentor on this issue, got my attention: the dioxins they are talking about are really PCBs. This was news to me but not news; it’s been out for about a week, but I want to tell you why I think it’s significant. [You can read about the history of PCBs here.]

Dioxins are not manufactured; they have no useful purpose. They are byproducts created when you burn things that have chlorine, or use chlorine for manufacturing other things, such as vinyl. And they were created at the time PCBs were manufactured, often contaminating those products. But many more dioxins are created when PCBs burn or break down from use. Or when you fry them in bacon.

PCBs were manufactured till the late 1970s in the United States (I don’t know until when in Europe but I am sure it was close to the late 1970s). After that, the only PCBs that remained were either those already in use, and those in waste landfills (official toxic waste landfills, and garbage dumps, where they don’t belong). Because PCBs are no longer manufactured, and because most of the PCBs in use have been taken out of use, there are not a lot of places to find them. Currently exist many more sources of dioxins.

Both the dioxin story and the PCB story were pretty much dead until this disaster happened, and I assure you it is a disaster. A lot of people have been exposed. The contaminated feed went to 46 farms. Nine were pig farms and 37 were beef farms; but the Irish government has not recalled any beef products. Consumers were told to destroy pork products purchased as far back as September — three months ago! That means these products have been on the international market for at least three months. This is not funny. What is funny in that gallows humor way is that health “experts” are claiming that there is no risk to consumers. The same article says “deadly dioxins found” and then someone says “but there is no risk.” This is what you always hear any time PCBs or dioxins are in the neighborhood.

And note that the risk is always cancer. It’s rarely mentioned to be hormonal, an immune system risk or any of the hundreds of other issues noted at far lower doses than cancer.

Science and industry used to claim that dioxins were more toxic than PCBs, by about a thousand fold. This turned out to be bullshit because PCBs are complicated mixtures of many congeners and isomers of the chemical (that is, permutations with similar formulas but which are VERY different in toxicity), and some of them behave exactly like the worst of the dioxins. So now, dioxins and PCBs are referred to by United States regulatory agencies, and apparently European agencies, as “dioxin-like compounds.” Thus, when PCBs were found in the Irish pork, they were referred to as dioxins. I know that this may seem about as interesting as baseball statistics. But I have to tell you that, after tracking these issues issue closely since 1992, I was pretty darned shocked that they were really talking about PCBs all this time.

One little problem here is that, while there is no known safe level of either group of chemicals — that is, no level of exposure where biological activity is NOT detected — there remain different standards for dioxins and PCBs. The standards are ridiculous, but they do exist, in dusty old reports that everyone knows are useless now. Generally, the “safe” level of PCBs was assumed to be about a thousand times higher than the “safe” level for dioxins. The last time anyone seriously pretended there was a “safe” level (before this story broke, wherein everyone is pretending except maybe for me), the “safe” level of dioxins was one part per billion, and the “safe” level of PCBs was one part per million. That’s a big difference: a thousand fold.

Today, PCBs are generally measured in parts per billion and dioxins are generally measured in parts per trillion.

So tell me this: When Irish or EU officials say tht the levels are 100 to 400 times the ‘legal limits’, just what are they talking about? Then a guy named Rob Evans of the Agriculture Department in Ireland admits of the levels, “They’re high. We expected there would be dioxins but we weren’t able to predict the ratio.” The ratio, that is, of PCBs to dioxins. I can pretty much assure you from this statement that we are talking about a contamination of severely contaminated used, as in very, very old, PCB transformer oil that was supposed to go to a toxic waste landfill, but which found its way into food.

It was not hydraulic oil; I truly doubt that many hydraulic systems have not had their fluid changed in 35 years. It was not bread wrappers. That is laughable. They don’t use chlorinated plastics (vinyl) to wrap bread. There are not many other possibilities. Transformers (and to a lesser extent) capacitors sometimes sit around for many years before someone gets around to switching them out. So, I would bet a few dozen zeros that we’re talking about old transformer oil.

But nobody in the mainstream press is stating the levels of anything. Nobody is saying how much of which dioxin or which PCB. Authorities are issuing no data; or nobody is publishing it, and it doesn’t seem like anyone is asking. I have looked at a number of these stories and I keep hearing so-and-so times higher than the legal limit, but I have not once seen the words parts-per-million, -billion or -trillion. And I can tell you this, when they suppress the data, there is a very good reason.

Note, I just found this article from a source called ChemEurope that gives the levels at 292 parts per billion PCBs. It states it as “micrograms per kilogram” which equals PPB. Based on other facts given, this suggests that the standard they are using is one part-per-billion.

Note that we still don’t know the levels of dioxins; they claim to be using PCBs as a ‘marker’ for dioxins, which you generally do for one of two reasons, from what I have discovered in the course of this issue: either you want to hide the level of dioxins, or you’re trying to save money because PCB tests are cheaper than dioxin tests.