- 29

' 453

," " ) 21 ,(2005 12:30
: ,
' ,
:
:" '

:

'

- ,
' '
"

'





"
"

:
- : "

" ':
.
,' , "
" , .
, , , ,
.
.
, , .
,
,
.
" - '
.
, , . ..
:

.
' .
.
, ,
. ,
, .

, -'
. .
,
. ,
, -'
. . .
. ,
, , .
. .

. '
.
'
,
, , ,
, , ,
,
. ' ..
:

If its okay with all of you I am going to stand at the front so that I can point
easily. Dr. Ben Tov and I have a two person show so that the slides are both in
English and in Hebrew. Dr. Ben Tov will do some additional explanations on
Id like to keep this very informal, so that if you have questions, especially

as I am talking, that need clarification please ask me so that you dont wait
until the end and you missed what I was trying to say. But well have plenty of
time for questions at the end.
First of all I should have started out and said toda raba. I am thrilled to
be here and it is a great honor for me to be able to be speaking in the
Knesset. I visited here as a visitor many times, but I have never had the
honor of being able to make a presentation of some of the important
science and
What I want to tell you today is sort of a little bit of a story about how
environmental chemicals can affect human health. One point I want to
make right at the beginning is that chemicals, environmental chemicals
are not the whole story. The incidence of disease, the health of our
population is not only related to environmental chemicals. It is one
contributor. It is a very important contributor to the public health. We
all know that
Prof. Yona Amitai:
What is the DABT.
Prof. Linda Birnbaum:
I am a professor at both Dukes University and the University of North
Carolina. I am the director of Toxicology for the United States
Environmental Protection Agency. DABT is Board certification and
toxicology. It is an international certification that you have to pass a
horrendous test that thank goodness I passed the first time, because I
am not sure I could have ever sat for it again. Every five years you
have to basically be retested, although I have done it enough times now
that I just have to prove that I am still active.
We all know that certain things are bad for us. I think today it is
unquestionable that cigarette smoke is a major human health problem
both for the person smoking, for those around and certainly for the
unborn. We all know that alcohol is a problem. Too much alcohol is a
major cause of health, affects as well as sociological problems, I am
sure in Israel as well as in our country. We are all aware of the adverse
effects of lead. In fact many of us know that some people speculate
that the Roman Empire fell because of the lead in the pottery basically
poisoning the population. We all know that ozone is a problem. Too
much ozone, such as what happens due to car exhaust and automobile
exhaust that we have in the stratosphere and then not enough ozone up
in the stratosphere. Too much in the troposphere, not enough in the
stratosphere. So the UV penetrates. We have problems with ozone
being associated with too much UV causing skin cancer and
suppression of the immune system. But what about other chemicals?
So this is just a little cartoon. I am going to talk about a number of the
different kinds of chemicals. If we start on your bottom left with
indoor air we know that most people spend most of their time indoors.
This is especially true of the very young and the very old. So we may
have people who are special risks because they spend time indoors and
we know that there are many, many different pollutants indoors. We
know that there are many biological agents microbes, parasites,
viruses and so on, which are present and we can be exposed to that can

affect our health. We know that there are many different pesticides and
occupational chemicals that can be toxic. I am going to talk about some
of those. I mentioned lead. Well come back to that. I think everybody
is familiar with the asbestos story. One point I should mention with
asbestos is we know that if you have masithilioma, we know that you
had asbestos exposure. But asbestos is a very good example of
interaction between chemicals because in fact asbestos and cigarette
smoking is more than ten times worse for you than just asbestos alone,
or just cigarette smoking alone. I mentioned UV radiation and the
increased incidents of skin cancer and affects on our immune system. I
have mentioned ozone. P.M. I am going to talk about a little bit more.
PM is particulate matter and at particles so tiny that none of us can see
them. We know that as the levels of PM go up in the air our levels of
not only pulmonary disease but cardiovascular disease increase. Then I
am going to talk a little about mercury. We have all known from the
time of Sir Isaac Newton that he was poisoned by inorganic mercury
and I am going to talk a little about the problems with organic mercury.
Shouldnt we be concerned about these potential environmental threats
to human health? How do we understand how serious the problems are.
What is the risk and risk is defined as the probability, really, of injury,
disease or death. So environmental risk is the probability of injury,
disease or death resulting from exposure to a potential environmental
hazard.
Now risk assessment is the science of environmental policy decision
making. Risk assessment is composed of four parts. The first part is
exposure assessment. Thats when we find out what you were exposed
to, how much you were exposed to, when you were exposed to it, was
that at a critical time in your development; was it as a child, was it as
an adult, was it before you were born? Was it a short single exposure
or was it an ongoing chronic exposure? Because all those things are
going to be very important in understanding what the risks might be.
The second part of risk assessment is hazard identification. Hazard
identification is when we ask the question is what is the potential for
an adverse effect. What could this chemical cause and how likely is it
that such a kind of effect could occur.
The third part of risk assessment is where we say, okay, you have had
this exposure, how does that exposure translate into a body
concentration, a tissue concentration and how does that relate to the
response. You are never going to have an effect from a chemical if you
have no exposure. So this third part of dose response assessment is
extremely important. Then the risk characterization is where we put it
all together. This is where we say, okay, we understand how much you
were exposed to and how much got into your body. We understand what
that relationship is between a response and we then predict what that
could mean. As I mentioned, this is the scientific part of decision
making because we all know that environmental or any kind of policy
involves more than just the science.
So now I want to mention a couple of other environmental chemicals
that are in the news today. I could go back and talk history. I am not
only talking about the Romans and Sir Isaac Newton. But I could talk

about Bopa with the explosion of a factory in India letting out a lot of
iso cyanide, or I could talk about the burning of rivers in the United
States because of all the pollution on the surface of the rivers. Or I
could talk about the London smog. Many of you might have heard of
the London smog in 1952 when you literally could not see your hand
before your face. Hundreds, hundreds of people died as a result of that
very heavy pollution. But I am going to talk about some very recent
episodes of pollution that are ongoing and that are occurring not only
in my country but I am sure many of these are issues in Israel and
throughout the world.
The first one I want to mention is mercury. I mention that we have
known for hundreds of years about inorganic mercury, but for about the
last fifty or sixty years we are very concerned with organic mercury, or
what is known as metal mercury. Now we dont make metal mercury
but we get it from eating primarily fish. The fish can make it. We know
now that at least in the United States of every four million babies born
almost ten percent of them have levels of mercury or their mothers
have levels of mercury resulting in levels in the baby which are of
concern. We know that elevated mercury and I am not talking about
levels where you would see frank behavioral changes or structural
changes I am talking about kinds of levels where there will be as
subtle, a small IQ change or small behavioral changes. But almost ten
percent of the babies in our country are at risk for small effects due to
mercury. One point Ill make now and Ill probably make again several
times, is that frequently when we are looking for environmental
problems it is very difficult to pick them up in the individual because
we are looking at small changes and you have to pick them up by
looking at the population and find that there are more people needing
special services or more people at risk because of their exposure. So
metal mercury from fish is a problem.
Lead is another problem. As I said, not only did lead maybe cause the
fall of the Roman Empire, but we know that elevated lead during
development is the main cause of IQ problems and behavior problems
in children. We know that the levels of lead we used to think that a
level of 25 micrograms for decil was okay. We then lowered the
level to about ten and we thought that was okay. Now recent data
suggests that maybe we have to keep going down. But what this curb is
really showing is the decrease in the number of children who have very
high blood lead in our country. This was as a function of banning lead
from gasoline. In the 1970s when we banned lead from gasoline
thats 1976 to 1988 we had a dramatic drop in the level of lead in
children, because we no longer had leaded gasoline. So that was an
example of a regulatory decision which had a very desirable public
health impact. I think Shay wants to say something.
:

, .

. .

 , ,
, .
, .
. .
:

So now I want to give another example of another metal which is of concern

and I know this is a concern in Israel again, as well as not only our country but
other parts of the world. We recently found arsenic can be found again both
in inorganic forms and in an organic form. An organic arsenic is used as
pesticide. We now estimate that the use of organic arsenic, for example, in
treating w as well as in pesticides maybe associated with a significant
connect cancer risk in our population. The really important thing though, I
think this is less of a problem than the inorganic arsenic, which is a
contaminant of drinking water in many parts of the world. The interesting thing
about inorganic arsenic is that in trying to do the right thing the public health
community made a big mistake. In parts of, for example, West Bengal,
Bangladesh, Viet Nam, Inner Mongolia, Hungary, parts of the United States,
Chile, Argentina, we had problems with contaminated surface water with
microbes. So people were having gastrointestinal illness because of the
microbial contamination of drinking water. So they sunk wells into the aquifer
and the level that they went into the aquifer was highly contaminated or turned
out to have high levels of arsenic. So right now in West Bengal we have several
million people who are suffering from frank arsenic poisoning because we tried
or the public health community tried to do the right thing. So we need to be
concerned sometimes that we dont switch from one situation to another which
could be even more serious. Thats just interesting. But arsenic is an ongoing
problem, both the inorganic and the organic form.
What about pesticides? We use different kinds of pesticides in much of
the world today than we did thirty or forty years ago. But some of the
new pesticides are also turning out to have problems. Some of the
pesticides we used to use were things like DDT. It is still used in
places like Mexico, India and certain other places in the world. But
DDT, cordein, a number of other pesticides were very, very persistent
in the environment. They didnt go away either in the environment or
in animals, or in people, so that we are still dealing with them. The
pesticides we use today break down much more rapidly. So pesticides
like peri and diazinon, which are again pesticide, they are still
used. I know they are used in Israel because I asked. They can no
longer be used inside in the United States. You cant take some to
spray for bugs in your house any more. But they are used outside. In a
recent study done in New York City, what they found is after they
stopped using these pesticides inside, babies were bigger. We know
that low birth weight in babies is a major long term health problem. So
there was a clear relationship between removal of the pesticides and
larger babies, which was good.

:

- .
, , , . ,
, .
, EPA- 2000
. , , '
, . ,
, .
.
:

Now I am going to switch gear a little to another class of chemicals which are
the dioxins and the PCBs. I know you have heard about these chemicals. One
of our big concerns with these chemicals is these are another group that dont
go away. I think it is important to understand that the PCBs were very, very
important industrial chemicals. They were used in electrical equipment. They
were present in paint and they were used because they lasted forever. Well we
now know thats not such a good thing. But dioxins were never intentional
industrial products. They were unwanted contaminants. Certain kinds of
herbicides, certain kinds of biocides, of the free cor bleaching of paper and
pulp products and of uncontrolled combustion and bad incineration. This is like
just a little bit of a history lesson that you have both in Hebrew and English
here about some of the major incidents that have involved these compounds. I
think whats important to know is that we didnt even know about dioxin or
TCDE until about just a little less than fifty years ago. I think you have all
heard of Agent Orange which was a herbicide that was sprayed as defoliant to
destroy all the vegetation in South Viet Nam War by the Americans.
Unfortunately that herbicide was contaminated with dioxins. There are long
lasting concerns about the health of people, not only about the American
veterans who served in Viet Nam but probably more concern for the people
living in South Viet Nam who were actually sprayed. There were several
incidents that occurred in the Far East. U Chow in 68 and U Chang in 79
were major rice oil poisonings, one in Japan and one in Taiwan in which rice
oil that people cook with when the rice oil was being made it gets heated and
somehow transformer oil that was in the heating coil that contained PCBs
leaked into the rice oil and thousands of people were actually poisoned by this
contaminated rice oil. These populations are being well studied for the past
thirty and forty years and we are understanding a lot of the effects that occurred
especially in the children of people who had been exposed as adults.
Another interesting episode was the Seve episode in Italy. I dont know at
that point a factory just near Milan exploded. It was a factory making
trichlorophynol, exploded and sprayed the area with dioxins. An occupational
physician, Palo Makareli had the intelligence and the amazing foresight to
collect blood from over 31,000 people at the time. He had no way to measure
the dioxin in the blood but he thought some time in the future the methodology

will become available. In 1991 the first reports, we could actually measure the
dioxins. Thats been extremely helpful in understanding what the real exposure
was.
I think some of you may have heard of the Belgian dioxin
poisoning
that occurred in 1999, which actually caused the fall of the Belgian
government. That episode was again really a PCB episode where again used
transformer oil got mixed into animal feed, or animal fat and then that was fed
to animals and it led to a great deal of loss of chickens and cows and sheep and
pigs in at least four or five different countries in Europe. It also prevented the
total at least in our country the tragedy was we could no longer import
Belgian chocolates, at least for a certain period of time.
I think the last episode of hi poisoning I want to mention and I think you
have probably all seen the very unattractive person that President Victor
Yushenko turned into. He was intentionally poisoned last September or
October at a state dinner. His picture was in the paper. It took a few months to
find out what the problem was with him, but he was poisoned with pure dioxin.
Thats one of the few instances that we know of where the dioxin was
intentionally produced. He got very, very little. He got only about two and a
half milligrams of the dioxin. But he will never recover from that episode.
So dioxins do many, many, many different kinds of things. I am not going to go
through all the kinds of things that dioxin does, but dioxins affect just about
every organ system in the body. They are developmental toxicants, neuro
toxicants. We produce the toxicants carcinogens. Neuro toxicants, you name it,
and they like to mess up every single hormone system that you have. So they
cause multiple effects in almost every tissue, both males and females,
essentially all vertebrate species. occurs from the molecular level to the
cellular level, to the organ system level, to the whole animal level. At high
levels they can actually cause death.
Now the good news about dioxins and the same thing is true with PCBs
actually, is that levels are going down. This is a result of the regulatory or the
regulations that have been instituted on these chemicals worldwide. PCB, their
production was banned in the United States in the seventies. The last country
that we know of making PCBs was the former Soviet Union in 1999 stopped
production. In the United States and in most of western Europe and Japan and I
am not as familiar with the situation here, but controls on incineration. The
banning of the contaminated herbicides. Stopping, no more bleaching and pulp
with chlorine products. All of that has led to a significant drop in the levels in
people, so that in 65 we said the dioxins were about 77. That has been cut in
about a third by thirty years later and we predict it will be cut by another third
in another twenty five years or so. This decrease in people we are also seeing in
animals, in wild life and in the environment.

:
, '
, . ,
, ,
,
, , , , .
, . ,
.
. ,
:

I told you about some old chemicals, some that are still a problem and I want to
mention an emerging issue that we are dealing with on the international
community. Some of you may have heard of the Stockholm Convention. At
that point there were twelve toxs that were identified to be banned. Well there
are other chemicals that are persistent organic pollutants. There are new ones.
Some of those are some of the brominated flame retardents. I am mentioning
this because one of the major sources of bromine flame retardents
worldwide is coming from the Dead Sea. So why do we have these flame
retardents. We have them because flame retardents save lives. They prevent
fires. There are many classes of flame retardents but the brominated ones are
especially cost effective so they are the ones that are being used the most. Then
there are about seventy five different kinds of brominated flame retardents,
although there are several major classes. One of the problems with these
brominated flame retardents, well, guess what, they are behaving just like the
dioxins and the PCBs and the DTT. They are persisting in the environment.
They are persisting in wildlife. They are persisting in people and they dont
stay put where you make them. So we are finding them now in the Arctic. We
are finding them at high concentrations in polar bears. So there is concern for
that. We dont know a lot about them. What we do know, at least about several
of the neighbor classes, is that they are endocrine disrupters, they are
developmental neuro toxicants. They are developmental reproductive toxicants
and some of them maybe carcinogous as well. I was just going to briefly,
quickly show you how much is made every year. Of the 500,000 tons of
bromine produced every year, about 40% of that goes into the brominated
flame retardents. While the US this in a significant amount, as does Asia and so
on, as in Europe, the amount that is being used in Japan and China is just
skyrocketing. So it is just something to think about as another concern. This is
just a quick example of the fact that we are now finding these chemicals. In the
US we didnt really start using these heavily until about fifteen years ago. Now
they are contaminating all of our food with the highest level being found in
meat. We also find them in fish and in dairy products. So we know that people
are being exposed to these chemicals because of the levels, in part at least,
because of the levels that are present in animal food.
So speaking about exposure I wanted to make the point that children are not
little adults. I mentioned, when I talked about exposure before that children

behave differently than, for example, adults. We know that children breathe
more air proportionately than adults do. They eat more food and drink more
water proportionately than adults do. They spend their time differently, not
only indoor outdoor time, but where do you find little kids? They are crawling
around on the floor and they are putting everything into their mouths. So
anything that is in house dust, for example, is going to get into the children as
well. They also eat dirt. Childrens bodies not only may they come in contact
with more pollutants because of their behavior, but skin, especially that of a
newborn, is more permeable than adult skin. They have a larger surface area, so
it is easier for chemicals to be absorbed because they have more room for
absorption through their skin or their lungs. Their brains, the blood brain
barrier that helps prevent chemicals from crossing to the brain is not as
developed in a young child, in an infant, as it is in an adult. For example we
know that they handle, they metabolize chemicals differently than adults do.
This can mean that children in different parts of childrens bodies receive more
contaminants than adults do.
This is just a fairly complicated fly, but the point I wanted to make is that if
you are dealing with development, there are critical windows of susceptibility.
If I take a compound, for example, that causes skeletal defects and I dont give
till the very end of pregnancy. This happens to be a rat but the same thing is
true for people. I dont give it to the very end of pregnancy, I am not going to
have any skeletal problems, because the bones are already developed. So it
depends when you give something, whether you see an effect.
The organism has increased susceptibility. First of all it is growing very
rapidly. Second of all cells are dividing and differentiating and turning into
different organs very extensively. There are lots of opportunities when cells are
dividing for different problems to start. The other point is we know that
development is a very, very highly integrated process. So if you interrupt it you
can mess up the normal development.
I am going to end by focusing a little bit on cancer. I think it is important to
understand that we know that a number of kinds of childhood cancer can be
associated with exposure to the parents. We know that thats true of radiation.
We know that thats true of certain occupational exposures, whether to solvents
with brain tumors or with leukemia. We know that parental smoking is
associated with cancer in children among other problems. We know that what
we see in people we also see in our animals. That is important because that
increases our confidence in what we see in the human epidemiology studies so
that we can see that exposure to a number of different kinds of chemicals in
rats or mice are associated with the number of different kinds of cancers in the
animals. In humans we also know that chemicals that act on our endocrine
system, chemicals that act like hormones, are associated with cancer. I think
many of you have heard of DES the Dry Ethel Sylvesteral Study. This was
given at high concentrations in the fifties, sixties and early seventies
supposedly to prevent miscarriages. Unfortunately, what happened was a small
number of the DES daughters developed vaginal cancer and it had never been

seen before in young girls. So that when you see something that no one has
ever seen before that really caused a lot of concern. We understand now thats
because DES is a synthetic estrogen. We know that early developmental
exposure to estrogens can be associated with cancer both in people and in our
animal models. We also know that in adults estrogens are associated with an
increase in breast cancer. One of the major risk factors for breast cancer is your
lifetime estrogen exposure.
I want to mention herbicides because these are major new herbicides.
Atrozene at least is used so heavily in the US that at least sixty percent of our
population is exposed in a daily basis to this compounds. We know that in adult
rats this causes breast cancer. But of greater concern is what it does is that it
exposed the Both dioxins and after being induced similar things it affects
hormone which is a major reproductive prolactine, which is a major
reproductive hormone and it really authors the development of the breast. So
the mammary glands during development, you have the underlying fat pad and
then the ducts form on top of that fat pad. Both atrozene and dioxins block that
formation of the duct. So what does that mean? That means that when that
daughter grows up she has trouble making milk because she doesnt have the
normal ducts but also in our experimental animal models we show that that
female offspring is much more susceptible to cancer because the structure is
different. So that leads to a question, not only for experimental animal research,
but for our human studies. In experimental animals we might say, are we
looking for cancer by exposing animals at the wrong time. Should we be
looking from developmental exposure. But for our human studies, are we
measuring chemicals in people with cancer. Is that the wrong thing to do?
Because in fact cancer takes a long, long time to develop so should we be really
trying to understand what the exposure was like twenty years, thirty years ago,
forty years ago, if we want to understand the causes of environmental cancer
today.
With that I want to thank all of you for your attention and I want to thank all of
my colleagues, students and friends throughout the world who have helped me
to look at the big picture. Thank you.
:
'
, , , .
. ,
, , ,
.
,
,
,
, .
, , ,
, , .
, ,

 ,
. .
, ,
,
.
, . ,
, , .
, , .
, . , , '
' . ,
.
. '
. . .
( ) :

Could you please explain the connection between the triozene and where is
triozene found and the development of young girls into
Dr. Birnbaum:
The question is about the triozine herbicides and where are they found.
There is a whole family of herbicides of which atrozene is at last one of the
lively used, is used on a whole variety of different kinds of crops. So it can be
found, or residues can be found on food. It is also found because it is used on
the fields, it gets into the drinking water. It is also used on strawberries and a
couple of other crops in the United States anyway. We really dont know what
its role is in the development of young girls. We do know from these studies
and experimental animals that is authoring the development of the breast when
the exposure is early. So we really dont know about the potential effect in
people yet.
Dr. Litov:
From the University in Jerusalem. Could you repeat the conversation we had
yesterday, from all this shouldnt we be going to primates for zero emissions.
We had a little discussion based upon some of the stories in Israel.
Prof. Birnbaum:
Dr. Richter was asking me about my opinion about reduction in pollution and I
happen to be pragmatist, and I think the dioxin story is a good one. About
nineteen, early eighties we banned the production of some of the major
herbicides that were contaminated with dioxins. In about 1985 or 86 the paper
companies stopped or began to stop doing the bleaching. In 1996 we
regulated incineration. Every time weve done something the levels have come
down. So our emissions of dioxin in 1985 it was about 30 kilograms of dioxin
emitted in the United States per year. In 1995 it was down to about 3 kilograms

of dioxins per year and in 2001 its down to about one kilogram of new
emission. The point that I wanted to make was that if you had tried to go to
zero emissions instantly you might never have gotten there. But by doing it
stepwise, saying we are going to target the biggest polluters first, you can get
major impact. So I am very happy that we have dropped our level by 99%. Id
like to get to zero but I think 99% is pretty good.
:
,

. , ,
, , '
,
.
,
.
:

(From the Ministry of Defense)

First of all I would like to congratulate for the fantastic overview of
such a complicated topic to people who are a mixture of scientists and

I would ask a recommendation from you. There are so many changes.

Lets just make three that you mentioned. Why is orange
emission from industry - - - - in anticipation of some defect.
Second is, dioxins and breast milk.
The third is, mercury in whole blood.
If you have use of an amount of money, and we take these three
examples, where would you put the money first?
Prof. Birnbaum:
I think I am going to take them separately, I think when you are talking
about expense you are talking about measure, measuring the levels for
example.
So I am going to take the dioxin example first. Because one of the
points I think is absolutely critical from a public health view, is that
we need to continue to encourage women to nurse their babies, even
though there are dioxins and PCBs and frame retardners and DVE is in
their milk. We still know that babies who are nursed do better than
babies who dont nurse. The mothers do better too. So we really want
to continue to encourage and we dont want any concern about the level
in breast milk to prevent that from happening. Thats very important.
As far as the measurement of dioxin levels, it is very, very, very
expensive. But we know what is producing dioxins so I would say you
might be better off trying to control the processes that generate dioxin
like bad incineration. When incineration is done using appropriate
technology it is not a problem. But bad incineration is a big problem.

As far as the mercury, we also know that the mercury is in some ways
is the story I talked about the public health that is hard you cant
look at an individual child and say, if you had five points less
mercury when you were growing up you would have had five more IQ
points. But you can look at a population of children and you can see
and you shift the distribution so you have more children needing
something. We know again, I in some ways, rather than mercury is
different because if we find elevated mercury in a child there are
treatments that you can give to help remove that mercury. There is
nothing we can do about dioxin. If you have dioxin in your body, if
you lose a lot of weight you may get rid of some of it, but thats about
the only thing you can do. But I think with mercury there is more
reason to monitor for mercury because there is something you can do.
Thats important.
With the these are endocrine disrupting chemicals. At least
now that they have started measuring in the United States, we are
finding them all over the place. We are finding them in everybody.
Again, there is no way we know of to get rid of them from the body, so
I think we are better off trying to prevent them from ever getting into
the body.
Yeshayahu Bar Or:
I am from the Ministry of Environment. Id like to know perhaps you
can advise us about the sludge being used. Israel has offered through
relations to get the sludge via the agricultural groups. Something going
on with the green disposal. There has been some concern about it. Can
you enlighten us on that?
Prof. Birnbaum:
I can only give you my opinion which is it is not only dioxin in sludge that may be an
issue. It may be that frame retardants are being found at very high levels in sludge as
well. Very, very high levels. In fact a colleague of mine from Cornell mentioned that
if we regulated frame retardants the same way we regulated PCBs, the sewage sludge
would be considered hazardous waste. So I think there are concerns about the level of
these contaminants. When you spread them on the field, what you are doing is you
are leading to what we would call reintrainment in the environment. You are putting it
back into the environment. So you now increase the opportunities for ongoing
exposure.
I am a pragmatist so I would work to keep lowering the levels. Its like six years ago
the World Health Organization set a tolerable daily intake of dioxins. We set that
number not because we thought it was the perfect number, but we felt it was an
attainable number. Then we said, youve got to keep looking at this every ten years
and maybe we can keep lowering the number. So I would do things in a stepwise
fashion. Keep working to bring the level down.

Uri Adler:

My question is regarding

 :
' ,
, .
,
, ,
, .
.
:
.
. , .
, "
, ,
, .
. . . .
, ,
, , . ,
. , ,
, , .
. .
, ,
,
, .
, . " .
," , . ,
, ,
2000- 2002- .
. .
.
, .
- . .
. . .
.
.
. .
.
:
.
.
. ,
,"
. ,
. , ,

. ,
.
.
.

 :
.
. .
,
,
,
. " ,
" , , , "
,
" , , ,
,
.
:
, ,
, . ,
.
' :
" , .
, ,
. ,
.
, , . .


, ,
. , ,
. .
. , ,PCV
, .
. , . .
, , ,
, , . ,
- . .
, .
, , . , ,
. . .
, , , ,
.
. , .
:
' , ,

.
' :
, , "
. .
:
, ,
.
, ,
,

 , .
. ,
.
, ,
.
, ,
.
.
, .
. ,
. , ,
,
.
:
,
, ,
.
.
" ':
, , ,
.
, ,
, ,
. .
. .
, , .
.
, , , ," , , .
. , ,
, , .
, ,
.
:
" . ,
.
.
" ':
, . ,
.
14:15