Irish Pigs and Dioxin Dowels

national | consumer issues | opinion/analysis Tuesday December 09, 2008 18:45 by Watchdog

Governments arbitrary regarding dioxin concerns.

Irish pork is being widely recalled because a percent of it was found dioxin contaminated. Governments acknowledge the harms and dangers of dioxin...a by-product of industrial chlorine.
But other far more dangerous sources of dioxin, namely typical chlorine-contaminated cigarettes, are being ignored.

The first word in Dioxin is "die".

Moves to globally ratify the POPs Convention (re/ dioxins and more) seem to have vanished. Even US president-elect, Obama, never said he'd move to ratify POPs. But, did anyone ask if he would?
Apparently, no one even asked if he'd replace solar panels on the White House roof (at least as symbol of removing or minimizing petro-chem dioxin-delivering energy sources in the land).
[President Reagan, as a gesture to Big Oil, as one of his first presidential acts, had the Carter administration's Solar Panels removed from the White House. Even Clinton didn't put them back.]

Of course, the only way to phase dioxins off the earth (as per the POPs Treaty) is to END uses of chlorine. Since benign alternatives exist for all chlorine uses...this ought not even be a question.
That even Greens, Greenpeace (formerly anti-dioxin champ), and other toxics activists don't condemn literally-psychopathic cigarette firms, their chlorinated adulterants providers, and the supposed govt regulators, for the HIGH levels of dioxin from pesticides and bleached paper in smoke from typical (not all) cigarettes is...more than troubling.
If dioxins were found in pet store Gerbil Food, perhaps then we'd get some action...as long as the gerbils were not smokers, of course.
Thanks, ironically, to mainstream media PR re/ "harms of smoking", the path is Well Paved to simply expose the chlorine cartels as part and parcel, perhaps the most health harming parcel, of the publicly-hated Big Cig business. Big Cig IS Big Chlorine/Dioxin, in its worst form...because of the Inhalation Factor. Think Dow, DuPont, Bayer, BASF, et ilk...not just, as we are instructed, about tobacco plants.
Dioxin-contaminated pork is way down the list...as bad as that may be.

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If your local paper published reports about dioxin-contaminated Irish Pork, here is a sketch of what one might say to that paper's Letters or "Corrections" editor. This is about an Associated Press (AP) version of the story. (Google "Ireland pork dioxin" for any number of sources. Here's just link to Phila Inquirer version:
http://www.philly.com/inquirerworld_us20081208_Ireland_....html )

"Ireland recalls pork products after dioxin test" contained a line about dioxin being a "a potentially cancer-causing chemical".

That is certainly misleading, and probably just scientifically wrong. Dioxin has been classified in the USA as a Known Human Carcinogen. Nothing "potential" about it. It has graduated out of the "likely" and "probable" classifications.

Of course, exposed victims may die of something else before getting or dying from cancer. But if "potentially" here means that someone may Potentially get cancer, or die from it, that's different from the chemical (a by product of industrial chlorine). Dioxin IS cancer-causing; an exposed person may potentially Get cancer.

See: http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/jan2001/niehs-19.htm

Because of the lung's efficiency, inhalation of dioxin is far far worse than eating it in pork or elsewhere...yet Ireland has not found it helpful or life-saving to ban dioxin in smoke from typical cigarettes...dioxin that can only get there via the still legal adulteration of cigarettes with chlorine pesticide residues and chlorine-bleached paper. Tobacco, the popular villain, is innocent of that crime.

There's been no recall of Chlorine Contaminated Cigarettes...yet. Some 400,000 deaths a year, they say, in the USA alone from smoking these Dioxin Dowels...and it's still not recalled. (Deaths, if any, from smoking plain tobacco have not been reported.)
There isn't so much as a warning about this. Though One Hundred and Twenty Eight (128) countries, including the USA, have signed the Stockholm Convention to phase dioxin (and Eleven other worst of worst industrial pollutants) off the earth, dioxin is STILL permitted in cigarette smoke. That sentence merits re-reading.
No official can claim to be expert in this area if he/she doesn't know, and no official can say that "it's not harmful".

The article noted that the Irish pork was contaminated at 70 to 200 times the safety limits (as if ANY dioxin can be possibly safe).
But here we find that typical (chlorine contaminated) cigarettes may hit unprotected, unsuspecting, unwarned smokers with over SEVEN HUNDRED (716, to my calculations) times the US safety limit. Remember, dioxin cannot come from tobacco or any plant.

HEALTH EFFECTS OF DIOXINS ...with info re/ U.S. dioxin maximum limits etc.
See: http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/Dioxins-Cigarette-Sm...e.htm
and: http://www.gascape.org/index%20/Health%20effects%20of%2....html

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A letter written to just one newspaper, overseas, that insufficiently covered the story:

To the Editor:

It's good to see concern about dioxin-contaminated pork, and the reaffirmation that dioxin is indeed one of the most dangerous industrial substances in the world.

But the Irish pork producers have grounds to complain about arbitrary attention to dioxin in pork when nothing is done about dioxin levels in typical cigarettes that may be many times higher than in tainted pork. Dioxin in cigarettes cannot come from tobacco or any plant, of course; in cigarettes it is from still-legal chlorine pesticide residues, and still-legal chlorine-bleached wrap paper.

Many or most so-called "smoking related" diseases cannot be caused by smoke from any plant, but are already well-known to be effects of dioxin exposures. Tobacco, therefore, is the wrong target in smoking and health matters. Tobacco, being conveniently "sinful", is being scapegoated to protect the broad chlorine cartel, including oil, pesticides, plastics, paper/pulp, pharmaceuticals, and so on.

Pork producers could note that inhalation of dioxin is far worse than eating it because the lungs are so efficient in bringing it into the blood and then to fatty tissues to bio-accumulate, and wreak havoc interminably.
Dioxin is not merely "cancer-linked" as the article put it. It is a known human carcinogen, the worst classification.
In any case, cancer is just one of many effects of dioxin exposure. It would be safer to eat a typical Dioxin Dowel (chlorine-contaminated cigarette), and to light up and smoke a pork chop, than the reverse.

If Irish pork producers were smart, they'd re-define pork as "smoking materials", stuff it in slender tubes of bleached white paper, and be utterly exempt from scrutiny for whatever industrial toxins and carcinogens they have in their products.