Whistle-ass ignores the law to poison Americans with PCBs

[Pepperbelly]

-snip-

The Bush administration has ended a 25-year-old ban on the sale of land polluted with PCBs. The ban was intended to prevent hundreds of polluted sites from being redeveloped in ways that spread the toxin or raise public health risks.

-snip-

The decision, already in effect, has not been made public. It is being treated as a "new interpretation" of existing law, according to the memo, which was obtained by USA TODAY. As such, no public comment was required.


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usatoday/11765280

:grr: :grr:

[Pepperbelly]

1. This is unbelievable and I will kick it once ...

:kick:

[pansypoo53219]

2. what's

a little more poison.

[TacticalPeek]

3. This goes into the pile of virtually unreported bushco atrocities. n/t

[Pepperbelly]

4. We had a site near here that had served as a dump for PCBs when ...

they were making Agent Orange in Viet Nam. It took FOREVER to get the damned shit sealed up from the ground water, the responsible business having since gone bankrupt and left the toxic crap in rusting 33-gallon drums.

This is astounding. The stuff is damned near as poisonous as plutonium (well, that's an exageration) but still, it is DREADFUL.

What will come next? Making sure that there is no disclosure when someone wants to purchase the property?

[treepig]

5. as poisonious as plutonium you say . . .

PCB's could very well be more poisonous than plutonium, per this discussion on the toxicity of plutonium:

"The most toxic substances known to man are made by bacteria. Contrary to allegations by PSR, et al., plutonium is ``not a world-class toxicant, writes T. Don Luckey in a June 20 letter to Chemical and Engineering News. When injected intraperitoneally into mice, the LD50 (the dose that causes 50% deaths in 30 days) is about the same as that of the vitamin pantothenic acid.
On a scale in which plutonium has a toxicity = 1, the toxicities of other materials are:

mercury chloride 100
strychnine 1,000
actinomycin D 10,000
tetrodotoxin 100,000
perfringens A toxin 1,000,000
pestis toxin 10,000,000
shigella toxin 100,000,000
botulinal E toxin 1,000,000,000
tetanus toxin 100,000,000,000
botulinal B toxin 1,000,000,000,000
botulinal D toxin 10,000,000,000,000
The EPA is more concerned about carcinogens than toxins, but plutonium doesn't make the grade there either. Plutonium-contaminated workers have a lower total cancer mortality: 88% that of unexposed workers.

Is that right? That's surely the result of poor statistics... otherwise you're saying that working with plutonium can help -prevent- dying of cancer. Graft

I suspect the reason for the reduction in mortality is that their employers monitor their health much more closely, so cancers in these workers are usually caught at much earlier and more treatable stages. However that is only a guess. -- RTC 22:32 Mar 11, 2003 (UTC)"

from wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Plutonium (note i cannot get this link typed in properly - you'll have to enter it manually - it should be preceded by the usual http://www. and the happy face should be replace with a colon and upper case P)


unfortunately PCB's weren't on the comparative list with plutonium, possibly because nobody knows their exact effects on humans (from http://www.nccnsw.org.au/member/tec/projects/tcye/tox/PCBs.html) :

ACUTE TOXICITY
"PCBs are a group of chemicals that contain 209 individual compounds (known as congeners) with varying harmful effects. Information on specific congener toxicity is very limited; toxicity testing has been done on specific commercial mixtures, whereas PCBs found in the environment will have varied composition because of biotransformation or bioaccumulation.
No information is available on the acute (short-term) effects of PCBs in humans. . . ." (but they're probably not good!!)

more information on PCB's:

http://www.ktl.fi/dioxin/ptoq.html

[TacticalPeek]

6. I guess we should expect this from scumbags.

I get the feeling that they suspect their time may be short, so rape and pillage while they may.

[phillybri]

7. Kick for an important read....

:kick: