Groups ask EPA to counter Dow-funded dioxin outreach

The amended report by researchers at the U of M corrects a few points made in the original one but does nothing to change the importance of the study itself as informative regarding the likely overall impact of soil contamination in the Saginaw Valley or in fish-eating relative to dioxin content in serum of those who eat the fish from there …..Neither the original report or the altered one state that dioxins in serum are at SAFE levels or that eating fish, generally, from the riers there is a good idea…On the one hand, the UMDES can be respected for publishing the changes; on the other hand those changes do open the door for confusion and even criticism much like the criticisms that have been leveled against Scientific Advisory Boards all the way back to the original one that reviewed the 1994 EPA Dioxin Draft Reassessment and the more recent National Academy of Science Review of the Review…Lay people like Lois Gibbs and Warren Crummett ( retired DOW scitntist) disagree on dioxin’s potential for adverse health effects and on just about everything related to the science of dioxin research…Bruce Ames PhD from UCLA Berkeley and Sam Epstein MD from The School of Public Health at University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana have extremely opposing views of the dioxin saga as do countless other respected scientists. It was hoped that the UMDES would have escaped such controversy but it was doomed from the start as possibly well-intended special interest groups criticized both its members, its scientific advisory board, and even the ATSDR ( Alan Yarbrough and others) during its inception and protocol…..UMDES is but one of thousands of studies and it was part of an action plan to look for answers to SITE SPECIFIC questions at a site identified as highly contaminated by dioxins….The answers to those questions have been made available in many publications reviewed by the world scientific community …that its new analysis adds confusion to understanding is par for the course in the continuing dioxin debate…thankfully, the work done by Lesa Aylward suggests that environmental levels of dioxins are considerably lower now than previously and dioxin body burden is also much lower than previously…What is not yet known is “how low is low enough” to be confident that adverse health effects are unlikely…..Norbert Kaminski and his research team at the Michigan State University;’s Center for Integrative Toxicology are looking at those important questions and hopefully will add their findings to the long list of other research projects which have dominated the past 30+ years …..The US Military has looked in a Prospective Study lasting over 35 years at health effects among Vietnam Veterans in its Ranch Hand II Study and have made additions as time goes on to compensable health effects from dioxin exposures of Veterans during the Vietman War , the most recent being OTHERWISE UNEXPLAINED ischemic heart disease ( as of October 31, 2010). The UMDES was NEVER intended to be a health effects study…it was designed to look at exposures to dioxins in soil and in household dust and in locally caught fish to see if those exposures increased the dioxin in the blood of residents..Some of the inferences or findings support the work done by the government of New Zealand at Paritutu where airborne emissions appeared to impact the serum levels of dioxins among residents there.much like the UMDES suggestion concerning earlier emissions and their impact to locals along the floodplain..The fact that its findings were difficult to interpret underscores the whole story of dioxins as a highly controversial, long-lasting, expensive experience in the history of environmental contamination….an experience that appears to have no end in sight……………