New Scientist on contamination in Belgian food.

[Neil Tangri <ntangri@essential.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




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Neil TANGRI