Sir, - Dr Elizabeth Cullen, of the Irish Doctors' Environmental Association (July 18th), reveals a disturbing trend among many environmental lobby group - to shoot from the hip without checking the accuracy of basic facts. The fact the public is misinformed and often scared in the process, is of little concern.
Dr Cullen's organisation claims there is a complete absence of a database on dioxins, furans and PCBs in the human population. In fact, over the last five years the EU has completed two detailed inventories of dioxin and furan emissions in all member-states. In parallel, dioxin levels in the EU have been assessed against the Tolerable Daily Intake level recommended by the World Health Organisation. The conclusion of this work was that dioxin exposure levels were dropping by about 10 per cent annually and were in general compliance with the WHO levels.
At a national level the EPA is completing a detailed dioxin inventory to complement the EU work already completed. For over a decade dioxin levels in milk have been assessed adjacent to industrial facilities and in rural areas. This is a very accurate biological indicator as cows will concentrate in their milk any dioxins and PCBs in their pasture. All levels have been low with no indication of pollution.
Furthermore, Dr Cullen claims there is little or no toxicity data on 75,000 of the 100,000 chemicals on the EU market and limited data on 25,000, to her knowledge only four risk assessments are publicly available. This does great injustice to the mountain of work completed by the EU since the 1960s on the classification and labelling of dangerous substances and preparations. Over 4,000 chemicals have been assessed and given detailed classifications by the EU, this is available on the Commission's website.
Obligations have been firmly set with manufactures and suppliers to self classify chemicals which do not appear on the EU list. The catalogue of a chemical supplier, such as Merck, clearly indicates the huge volume of work this has entailed. Indeed in Ireland there already has been a prosecution over inaccurate labelling of agricultural chemicals.
We already have had the situation with a doctor in Co Louth taking a court case against BNFL over the high incidence of Down's Syndrome in the population there. Unfortunately, after significant expenditure it emerged there was no scientific evidence to support the claim and the case had to be dropped.
It is to be hoped that Dr Cullen's organisation will do more research on environmental issues so these mistakes are not repeated. - Yours, etc.,
Pat Swords BE, CEng., Glenageary, Co Dublin.