Ms. Clorfene-Casten's appeal to authority is hardly attractive in that the IJC members were nonscientists. In their ignorance, they put their full faith in the self-anointed guardians of the environment, namely groups like the Environmental Task Force. Her reference to the upcoming dioxin report is just another effort to portray a single organochlorine as representing all organochlorines.
Readers should pay close attention to Keith Schneider's article in the May 11 New York Times, stating the report's conclusions "are based on mathematical assumptions that have not been published in scientific journals" and that it "already caused a storm of dissent in federal agencies, principally in the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture, the agencies that have the primary responsibility for insuring the safety of food." For over a decade, radical environmentalists (including Ms. Clorfene-Casten in several articles for The Nation) and the EPA have sought to burn dioxin as a massively carcinogenic witch, only to watch helplessly as study after study found no carcinogenic effect on humans except, at most, at the very highest levels of exposure in workers exposed daily for over a decade. Now they are simply retrying the witch under new accusations, moving away from cancers and toward the effects on the fetus.
Far from being an industry-fabricated myth, the fact that "what happens in animals does not necessarily translate into humans" is shown by dioxin itself and the effect it has on different species. The impetus for the dioxin witch hunt was that it is amazingly lethal to guinea pigs. Yet, other studies have shown that 500 times the amount is necessary to have the same effect on the guinea pig's close cousin, the hamster. Overall, about 30 percent of that which causes cancerous tumors in rats during maximum tolerated dose testing does not do so in mice and vice versa. What, then, does this say for correlating between rodents and humans?
Ms. Clorfene-Casten also simply assumes there is no threshold below which carcinogens are no longer harmful, yet that flies in the face of everything we know about acute toxicity, in which the dictum is "the dose makes the poison." Dioxin specifically has been cited by several researchers as one that is probably harmless below a certain level of exposure.
The ad hominem about "folks who say dioxin is not dangerous" is just that. I, for one, was paid by REASON, and REASON's contributors are unknown to me. Saying don't trust anybody who prints on chlorine-bleached paper is practically the equivalent of saying don't trust anything in print--unless, of course, it's negative. It's become popular lately to attack The New York Times because Keith Schneider has become a real pain, but early during the Love Canal incident that same newspaper did some of the most alarming reporting on dioxin.
Dioxin-related lawsuits have been systematically filed by a group called Trial Lawyers for Public Justice. Settlements are normally sealed from view, but the fair presumption is these cases are settled out of court because it is easier to pay off their nuisance value than go to trial.
The implication of the list of cancers and other disorders is that all are caused by organochlorines. But none has been strongly connected to any, much less all or most, organochlorines. The Great White Hope of the radical environmentalists was Mary Wolff's 1993 study purporting to link breast cancer and DDT, but that was shot down in April by a much larger study. Both studies exonerated another environmentalist- targeted organochlorine, PCBs.
I trust most readers will recognize the resort to Bastiat's Broken Window theory. In this, the French economist mockingly noted that France's economy would boom if someone went around busting every window in sight, thereby creating tremendous employment opportunities for window makers and fixers and causing a ripple effect throughout the economy. Greenpeace's Greenfreeze refrigerator may be a big hit in Europe, but if Americans won't buy it there's probably a good reason. It's not that U.S. companies don't make it; they don't make VCRs, either.
It's true there are alternatives to organochlorines. Some will mean tremendous expense, including having to spend up to $800 to have car air conditioners converted. Some will mean doing without. Some will cost lots of lives because of inaccessibility to many pharmaceuticals and other products. All of this places a tremendous burden of proof on the would-be banners. Readers may judge whether Ms. Clorfene-Casten has met it.
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The strongest attack on this assumption comes from an unlikely source: Warren Farrell, formerly an activist in the women's movement and the only man elected three times to the board of the National Organization for Women. Farrell is the author of The Myth of Male Power (Simon & Schuster, 1993), which Barbara Dority, co-chair of the Northwest Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce, says has the "potential for being The Feminine Mystique of the men's movement." Farrell writes: "Feminism justified female 'victim power' by convincing the world that we lived in a sexist, male-dominated, and patriarchal world. The Myth of Male Power explains why the world was bi-sexist, both male and female-dominated, both patriarchal and matriarchal--each in different ways."
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The strongest attack on this assumption comes from an unlikely source: Warren Farrell, formerly an activist in the women's movement and the only man elected three times to the board of the National Organization for Women. Farrell is the author of The Myth of Male Power (Simon & Schuster, 1993), which Barbara Dority, co-chair of the Northwest Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce, says has the "potential for being The Feminine Mystique of the men's movement." Farrell writes: "Feminism justified female 'victim power' by convincing the world that we lived in a sexist, male-dominated, and patriarchal world. The Myth of Male Power explains why the world was bi-sexist, both male and female-dominated, both patriarchal and matriarchal--each in different ways."
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