Words: 555
Dioxin was the primary toxic component of Agent Orange, was found at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, NY. (http://www. Environed. Org/issues/dioxin/index. HTML) The major sources of dioxin are in our diet. Since join is fat-soluble, it baccalaureate up the food chain and it is mainly (97. 5%) found in meat and dairy products (beef, dairy products, milk, chicken, pork, fish and eggs in that order… See chart below). In fish alone, these toxins fasciculate up the food chain so that dioxin levels in fish are 1 00,000 times that of the surrounding environment.
The most conspicuous source of dioxin pollution is from paper mills which may pollute nearby streams with wastewater. Fish living downstream from paper processing plants have been found to contain significant amounts of dioxin in their tissues. In Peas dioxin report, they refer to dioxin as hydrophobic. This means that dioxin, when it settles on water bodies, will avoid the water and find a fish to go in to. The same goes for other wildlife. Dioxin will find animals to go in to, working its way to the top of the food chain.
Dioxin has been know to cause cancer in many different cases such as in explosion at a Hoffman-Larch chemical plant in Sevens, Italy, in 1976. People did not have any signs of cancer at first. So everyone said look at Sevens dioxin does not cause cancer. Now a new study in the journal EPIDEMIOLOGY reveals that people exposed to dioxin during the Sevens explosion have begun to exhibit excessive numbers of cancer cases. Dry. Linda Barnum, director of environmental toxicology for U. S. EPA now says that this case is just another strike against dioxin.
The area around Sevens has been divided into three zones, called A, B and R. The small A zone was most heavily contaminated, but its 724 residents were evacuated. (“Heavy” contamination means that each square yard of land contained 13 to 494 micrograms of dioxin; a micrograms is a millionth of a gram and there are 28 grams in an ounce. ) The B zone was less heavily contaminated UT its 4824 residents were not evacuated; zone B contained 43 micrograms of dioxin per square yard of soil, or less.
The R zone was even less contaminated (average contamination being 4. 3 micrograms per square yard), so its 31 ,647 residents were probably exposed to low levels. Another 181 , 579 people living beyond zone R serve as a control group living in “uncontaminated” areas. The greatest cancer increase has occurred in zone B. In zone A the numbers are small and no significant cancer increases have occurred. In zone R one kind of cancer has increased: soft tissue sarcoma. Previous studies have linked dioxin exposure to soft tissue sarcoma in humans.
In zone B, among women there has been an observable increase in cancers of the gall bladder and Bellary tract (the system that delivers bile from the liver to the small intestine), and in cancers related to the blood-forming system (multiple myeloid and myeloid leukemia). Among men in zone B, there were observable increases in cancers of the blood-forming system, and in one kind of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (a cancer of the lymph system called lymphoreticulosarcoma). This new study only covers the period 1 976 through 986–10 years after the Sevens accident.