{"id":7544,"date":"2008-12-09T13:00:05","date_gmt":"2008-12-09T18:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=7544"},"modified":"2008-12-09T13:21:03","modified_gmt":"2008-12-09T18:21:03","slug":"dioxins-found-in-irish-pork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/environment\/dioxins-found-in-irish-pork\/","title":{"rendered":"Dioxins found in Irish Pork; but where’s the data?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note:<\/strong> The following article was written by Carol van Strum, a long-time friend of Planet Waves and a brilliant environmental activist. Author of the book <\/em>A Bitter Fog, Carol recently appeared on Daily Astrology & Adventure<\/strong> with an article on gypsy moths<\/a>. Below, she comments on the dioxin scare in Ireland,<\/a> where pig feed was recently contaminated by dioxins and, as a result, pork was recalled from retail shelves around the world. –RA<\/em><\/p>\n

\"British<\/a>
British cuts of pork; the same terminology is used in Ireland. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dear Friend and Reader,<\/p>\n

Imagine you have children and you actually love and protect them. A well-dressed man comes to your door and says he’s recalling all the food products your family’s been eating for four months. You ask why, and he says poison has been found in that food, and in the feed given to the animals that produced it.<\/p>\n

\u0432\u0402\u045aBut we already ate all that food,\u0432\u0402\u045c you say.<\/p>\n

\u0432\u0402\u045aNot to worry,\u0432\u0402\u045c the man says. \u0432\u0402\u045aYou’d have to eat it for more than four months to get effects.\u0432\u0402\u045c<\/p>\n

\u0432\u0402\u045aThen why are you recalling it?\u0432\u0402\u045c you ask.<\/p>\n

\u0432\u0402\u045aBecause there is 80 to 200 times the safe level of the poison in that food,\u0432\u0402\u045c he says.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u0432\u0402\u045aSo how can eating it for four months be safe? What kind of poison is this?\u0432\u0402\u045c you ask. \u0432\u0402\u045aExactly how much of it was in the food? Exactly how much is a safe level? And how much of it would it take to hurt or kill a child?\u0432\u0402\u045c<\/p>\n

\u0432\u0402\u045aI am the Chief Medical Officer and there is no cause for alarm,\u0432\u0402\u045c he says.<\/p>\n

If at this point you are not hauled off for assault and battery on a chief medical officer, you might seek out media coverage of the issue, looking for answers. And lo and behold, not a single media source even asks the simple, urgent questions you raised, much less answers them.<\/p>\n

Astonishingly, this is what has happened with the dioxin in Irish pork issue. The Irish government recalls all Irish pork products after finding dioxins both in pork and in the animal feed fed to the pigs. And nowhere will you find a single mention of the exact kinds of dioxins found, the amounts found, the levels considered \u0432\u0402\u045asafe\u0432\u0402\u045c and who determined such levels, or who tested the meat and feed in the first place, and why, and when? Instead, you will find alleged \u0432\u0402\u045aexperts\u0432\u0402\u045c reassuring you that there is no cause for alarm. Decades ago, residents of Love Canal were told the same thing by experts who wouldn’t enter their homes without moon suits and respirators.<\/p>\n

To anyone who’s studied dioxin issues over the last 60 or so years, this is a drearily familiar scenario. Dioxin, named for the most toxic of 75 related compounds, 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, or TCDD, happens to be the most toxic synthetic molecule ever created. In unpublished documents, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials consider it as toxic and as persistent in the environment as plutonium. Yet after more than 50 years of study, the U.S. government has to this date never established a regulatory standard for TCDD, lest polluting industries lose profits or \u0432\u0402\u201c far worse \u0432\u0402\u201c face liability.<\/p>\n

It has been established, through study after study after study over many decades, that there is in fact no safe level of dioxin exposure, i.e., no level small enough not to cause adverse health effects. Any \u0432\u0402\u045aexpert\u0432\u0402\u045c who claims there is such a safe level is lying, and any journalist who repeats the lie is unworthy of the profession. To protect industry, regulators may set allowable dioxin levels in food or water or air, but these are simply convenient limits \u0432\u0402\u201c usually based on what’s already there \u0432\u0402\u201c and have absolutely no basis in safety.<\/p>\n

Also solidly established is that dioxins \u0432\u0402\u201c and especially TCDD \u0432\u0402\u201c are cumulative poisons, meaning each exposure adds to the burden of all previous exposures. Thanks to unregulated industrial dioxin production, humans and all other living things are now exposed to dioxins from conception to grave, from such ubiquitous products as paper, herbicides, pharmaceuticals and plastics, as well as combustion and disposal of such products. To suggest that eating dioxin contaminated pork for four months is safe \u0432\u0402\u201c without revealing the dioxin levels in the pork and without regard for the consumer’s previous body burden level \u0432\u0402\u201c is irresponsible in the extreme.<\/p>\n

What’s going on here is the typical bureacratic tight-wire act between protecting industry profits and appearing to protect human health. Since neither the government nor the media have revealed the actual data \u0432\u0402\u201c the exact kinds of dioxins and the exact levels found, and where, and when \u0432\u0402\u201c one can only surmise that the levels must be high enough to cause acute effects and therefore the government had to act, but must do so without alarming the public or suggesting the remotest possibility of liability. This, in fact, seems to be the primary government motive in dioxin regulation: to protect industries against lawsuits by the people they harm.<\/p>\n

If this sounds like an extreme view, the remedy is to produce and publicize the data, not conceal all information in lies and obfuscations.<\/p>\n

Yours & truly,<\/p>\n

Carol Van Strum<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note: The following article was written by Carol van Strum, a long-time friend of Planet Waves and a brilliant environmental activist. Author of the book A Bitter Fog, Carol recently appeared on Daily Astrology & Adventure with an article on gypsy moths. Below, she comments on the dioxin scare in Ireland, where pig feed … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[583],"tags":[36,753,52,755,117,754],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7544"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7544\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}