New Scientist on contamination in Belgian food.

["Jackie Hunt Christensen" <jchristensen@iatp.org>]

>              Recipe for disaster
>
>                             Debora Mackenzie
>            BELGIANS WILL BE REELING from
>            further shocks this week. Food which was last week
>            revealed to have been contaminated with dioxins also
>            contained high levels of PCBs--and all the
>            contaminated produce has probably already been
>            eaten. What's more, the first estimates of likely doses
>            suggest that young children may be at risk from the
>            poisons. 
>
>            Meat and eggs started reappearing on Belgian grocery
>            shelves this week, after the discovery of high levels of
>            dioxins in chickens and eggs led to the destruction of
>            thousands of tonnes of food. 
>
>            In January, chicken farmers noticed that eggs were
>            not hatching and that chicks had neural disorders. At
>            first, vets suspected nutrient deficiencies. In April,
>            however, a feed manufacturer sent a laying hen and
>            suspect feed to RIKILT, the Dutch State Institute for
>            Quality Control of Agricultural Products based in
>            Wageningen--the nearest laboratory that could
>            measure dioxins. 
>
>            RIKILT found 781 parts per trillion of dioxins in fat
>            in the feed--more than 1500 times the legal limit. The
>            contamination was traced to an 80-tonne batch of fat
>            produced by Verkest, a company near Ghent, which
>            was sold to 12 feed manufacturers. 
>
>            Wim Traag of RIKILT says the batch contained 8
>            litres of oil containing dioxins and PCBs, which are
>            also toxic. One theory is that used transformer oil,
>            rich in PCBs, was dumped in a public recycling
>            container for used frying oil. 
>
>            The batch would have made 1600 tonnes of feed,
>            enough to feed 16 million chickens for a day, says
>            Traag. The number of people affected depends on
>            how many animals ate the poison and passed it on in
>            meat or eggs. "Either a few people got a large dose, or
>            many people got a small dose," says Traag. 
>
>            So far only two chickens and two eggs collected from
>            hatcheries in April have been analysed. All were
>            highly contaminated. The contaminated feed may
>            have also been eaten by pigs and cattle, prompting the
>            widespread withdrawal of meat products across
>            Europe. But meat and eggs produced more recently
>            have so far tested clean. "The contamination has
>            probably all been eaten," says Traag. 
>
>            The two chickens contained 958 and 775 parts per
>            trillion of dioxin in their fat, and one had 400 parts per
>            million of PCBs--400 times the Dutch limit for food.
>            Given the average Belgian diet, says Martin van den
>            Berg of the University of Utrecht, if all eggs and
>            chickens in the affected area contained 900 parts per
>            trillion of dioxin in their fat, people would have
>            consumed forty times the WHO's recommended daily
>            limit of 1 picogram per kilogram of body weight. As
>            certain PCBs resemble dioxins as well, he says, toxic
>            limits could well have been exceeded a hundred-fold. 
>
>            The impact on the Belgian population--and on people
>            elsewhere who ate Belgian products--depends on how
>            much food was contaminated and how long it was
>            available. "Most people carry 2 to 6 nanograms per
>            kilogram of body weight of dioxins already," says
>            Rolaf van Leeuwen of the WHO's European Centre
>            for Environment and Health in Bilthoven, the
>            Netherlands. A single egg containing 900 parts per
>            trillion of dioxin in its fat adds 6 nanograms to that
>            load--an increase of as little as 1.4 per cent for an
>            adult, but as much as 20 per cent for a three-year-old.
>            Like PCBs, dioxins persist in body fat. 
>
>            The doses consumed by the Belgians are probably too
>            low to cause cancer, according to van den Berg, but
>            could affect neural and cognitive development, the
>            immune system, and thyroid and steroid hormones,
>            especially in unborn and young children. "People at
>            risk should be identified now, and followed medically
>            for the next ten years," he says.
>
>                         From New Scientist, 12 June 1999
>