US Report to Firmly
Link Dioxin With Cancer
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The US government is poised to declare firmly that dioxin, a toxin found throughout the food supply, and in the bodies of most people in the world, causes cancer in people, officials said on Wednesday. (May 17, 2000 )
Made notorious when it was fingered as the toxic component in Agent Orange -- used to clear forests in the Vietnam war - dioxin caused the evacuation of the town of Times Beach, Missouri, in 1983 and of the Love Canal site in Niagara Falls, New York in 1978.
A draft report leaked to The Washington Post newspaper upgrades dioxin to the status of a "human carcinogen" but also concludes that health and environmental officials have done as good a job as possible to control it.
Officials who have been reviewing studies on dioxin for 10 years and who worked on the draft confirmed the newspaper report.
Activists welcomed it. "This report shows that dioxin threatens the health of every American," Lois Gibbs, a former Love Canal resident who helped found the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, said in a statement.
"Now we need the EPA to officially release the final version of the Dioxin Reassessment Report. Then we need government to phase out the practices and products that make dioxin. We know how to do this."
Dioxin has hormone-like effects on the human body, causing changes that can lead not only to cancer but to infertility and other sexual changes. Vietnam veterans exposed to dioxin claim it has caused a variety of ills including cancer and birth defects in their children.
The National Toxicology Program of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) also tried to declare dioxin a known human carcinogen in its report on cancer-causing substances released this week. But a lawsuit by New York restaurant owners, who claim the link to cancer will scare customers away from their food, has blocked the publication.
The EPA report, due out in June, notes that emissions of dioxin have plummeted from peak levels in the 1970s but still pose a significant cancer threat to some people who ingest it -- mostly in food, especially food of animal origin.
George Lucier, director of the National Toxicology Program and author of some of the chapters in the EPA report, said there is no avoiding dioxin. "Even penguins in Antarctica have dioxin in them," Lucier said in a telephone interview.
"It is found in food you eat and have to eat. Food in the United States is probably as safe as any in the world, but the foods that would contain it the most would be any kind of fatty meat, eggs, and so on."
It concentrates in fat, and is found even in breast milk - although experts say the benefits of breast feeding outweigh any threat from dioxins.
Over the past five years, the EPA has imposed regulations on major dioxin emitters, including municipal waste combustors, medical waste incinerators, hazardous waste incinerators, cement kilns that burn hazardous waste, pulp and paper operations, and sources of toxic chemicals known as PCBs.
"I think to a large extent we have done pretty well with it," Lucier said. "Dioxin levels are coming down in people's bodies, especially young people, which is good news."
There are many different dioxins but the form named in both the EPA and NIEHS reports is 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD). "Any time you combine heat, chlorine and organic material, there is the possibility of making dioxins," Lucier said.
Lucier said scientists do not quite understand how it damages the body, but it acts on a universal mechanism that controls cell functions. Dioxin attaches, or binds, tightly to a receptor called the AH receptor -- a kind of cellular doorway found in virtually all cells in the body. Once there, it changes the function of hundreds of genes.
Dioxin exposure has been linked to many different kinds of tumors. One study of Italians exposed to dioxin as children found evidence of hormonal changes. "When they have children, most all their kids are girls, not boys," Lucier said.
Lucier said his program hopes it can raise dioxin's status to a known human carcinogen, mostly so that government agencies can be encouraged to monitor its effects on the population.
But a group of New York restaurant owners, lead by business consultant Jim Tozzi, along with a medical device maker, have filed suit in federal district court claiming the upgrade would cause them economic harm.
The restaurant owners argue that people would stop eating at their restaurants because dioxin is found in food, while the device maker objects to statements that medical products containing polyvinyl chloride contribute to environmental dioxin when incinerated as medical waste.
Lucier said the next hearing on the case is in US district court in Washington on June 14.

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