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For three weeks, British families unwittingly ate carcinogenic dioxin-tainted eggs. Thousands of Germans farms were shut down[From "Chemical Month" on 13.7 Billion Years]
Yesterday, the Belgium-based SGS Consumer Testing Services said that "the recent health scare in Germany has once again focused international attention on the necessary measures required to avoid the contamination of the food chain by dioxins."
In January, supermarkets in Great Britain stripped their shelves of products made from eggs from Germany that were found to be contaminated with dioxin, which the EPA classifies as "a likely human carcinogen." (The most potent dioxin, 2,3,7,8-TCDD, was classified as a "known human carcinogen" in 1997 by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer.)
"The source of the dioxins has been traced to Harles & Jentzsch, a firm in Schleswig-Holstein where oils intended for use in bio-fuels were sold to 25 animal feed producers in November and December," according to the Daily Mail.
"Operations at 4,700 German farms have been closed and thousands of hens culled to prevent food supplies becoming contaminated. More than 8,000 chickens were ordered slaughtered and tainted food fears spread to Germany's pork industry."
According to the EPA's website, "Dioxin levels in the environment have been declining since the early seventies and have been the subject of a number of federal and state regulations and clean-up actions; however, current exposures levels still remain a concern."
A group of 210 chemicals that share similar properties and structures, dioxins are some of the most toxic pollutants known to man. They are not intentionally produced. They have no known use. They are a by-product of industrial processes, such as waste incineration and the manufacturing of pesticides. They exist in the air, soil, water, sediment and animal fat.
According to a Michigan Department of Environmental Quality report, "Exposure to low levels of dioxins can cause a variety of effects in animals, such as cancer, liver damage, and disruption of hormones. In many species of animals, dioxin weakens the immune system and causes a decrease in the system's ability to fight infection. In other animal studies, exposure to dioxin has caused reproductive damage and birth defects. Some animal species exposed to dioxins during pregnancy had miscarriages. The offspring of animals exposed to dioxins during pregnancy often had birth defects including skeletal deformities, kidney defects, weakened immune responses, and neurodevelopmental effects."
"Men have no ways to get rid of dioxin other than letting it break down according to its chemical half-lives," according to EJnet.org, an environmental justice web resource maintained by the Pennsylvania-based non-profit environmental research group ActionPA.org.
"Women, on the other hand, have two ways which it can exit their bodies: It crosses the placenta into the growing infant [or] it is present in the fatty breast milk, which is also a route of exposure which doses the infant, making breast-feeding for non-vegan/vegetarian mothers quite hazardous."
Noting that "blood dioxin levels in pure vegans have also been found to be very low in comparison with the general population," the group asserts that "the best way to avoid dioxin exposure is to reduce or eliminate your consumption of meat and dairy products by adopting a vegan diet."
