News media dioxin ‘witch-hunt’

Press, 25 June 1983, Page 9

News media dioxin ‘witch-hunt’

NZPA staff correspondent Washington

The American Medical Association has voted to mount a public relations campaign to counter what it called “hysteria” about dioxin. The move follows a Government decision to resite an entire township in Missour after dioxin levels there were found to be unacceptably high. Dioxin is present in 2,4,5T, a weedkiller widely used in New Zealand but banned for most uses in the United States. It was also used in Agent Orange, the defoliant the American armed forces used in Vietnam and blamed by many veterans in New Zealand, Australia and the United States for subsequent ill-health and the birth of defective children. The A.M.A. meeting in Chicago, accused the news media of conducting a witch-hunt against dioxin. Dr George Bohigian, the sponsor of the resolution, said no serious medical effects on human beings had resulted from dioxin spills and accidents studied during the last 20 years. The studies had shown only two short-term conditions, he said: a skin rash called chloracne, and apparently temporary nerve damage that causes numbness. Laboratory experiments

exposing animals to high levels of dioxin have produced cancers, and 2,4,5,-T was banned for general use in the United States after a group of women exposed to the chemical produced an unusually high rate of miscarriages. Dr Bohigian said that no longer-term effects had been reported even from Seveso, Italy, where a chemical plant exploded in 1976, exposing more than 37,000 people to dioxin. The A.M.A. resolution said, “The news media have made dioxin the focus of a witch-hunt by disseminating rumours, hearsay and unconfirmed, unscientific reports . . . attributed to scientists (Whose quotes should have been, ‘I don’t know’.”