And Ben & Jerry’s ice cream comes pre-packaged with dioxin.
Below is the Center for Health Environment and Justice letter to EPA demanding the issuance of the agency’s dioxin risk assessment.
But we’ve already done all you need to know about dioxin.
Read Steve Milloy’s FoxNews.com column, “A Scoop of Debunkey Monkey.”
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The Honorable Lisa P. Jackson
Administrator
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
1200 Ariel Rios Building
Washington, DC 20460Dear EPA Administrator Jackson:
Thank you for your attention to dioxin over the past few years.
We are writing to strongly urge you to finalize the EPA’s study on dioxin, which has been delayed for over 25 years.
Dioxin is one of the most toxic chemicals known to science. Every American is exposed to dioxin when they eat fatty foods, and nearly every American has measurable levels of dioxin in their body. Even babies are born pre-polluted with potentially harmful levels of dioxin. In 1985, EPA concluded that there was an increased cancer risk in humans at dioxin exposure levels lower than had been estimated by any government agency anywhere in the world. Since that time, EPA has reaffirmed this finding with stronger scientific evidence and has identified many other adverse health problems associated with dioxin exposure even at very low levels. The EPA report—the “Dioxin Reassessment”—still remains a draft, which has stymied the agency’s development of federal regulations for over 25 years.
On August 29, 2011, EPA announced its final plan for completing the Dioxin Reassessment. We are concerned that the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and other industry trade associations are now pressuring EPA to further delay the release of this important report once again. We believe the American public has a right to know about the health consequences of exposure to dioxin, and EPA needs to take steps to protect American families from this harmful class of chemicals.
We urge you to meet your schedule for finalizing the non-cancer portion of the dioxin IRIS assessment by the end of this month and to finalize the cancer portion as quickly as possible thereafter, as you have pledged.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, and for your commitment to protecting America’s health and environment.
Sincerely,
cc: Cass Sunstein, Administrator, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
Nancy Sutley, Chair, White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)
Paul Anastas, Assistant Administrator, Office of Research and Development, EPA
Rebecca Clark, Acting Director, National Center for Environmental Assessment
How many dioxin compouds are there? How many these individual dioxins are shown to be even remotely carcinogenic? Even if you assume that there is even one that is a carcinogen the risk (using linear risk assesment models) is so low that none of us will be alive when the one hypothetical case occurs. I would imagine EPA is still labeling all dioxin compounds carcinogens even where there is no clinical data to support the idea.
Best thing they ever did was to sit on the study. Maybe they haven’t found a way to regulate naturally accuring sources.
And yet people live longer, healthier, and better quality lives than ever before in human history.
And look what happens when you are polluted with dioxins. You start associating things that are wrong and make no sense. Dioxin afflicted think that the human population heats the earth and that there has never been such a heating in the earths history. Maybe the polluted need a frontal labotomy or something to disable their faulty circuitry.