Light Therapy for Tainted Fish
Aquaculture—farming fish for our dinner tables—is a big and growing international industry. One problem: Fishmeal can contain significant quantities of dioxins, which are toxic industrial pollutants.Danish scientists think they may have a solution, however: Irradiate the fishmeal with sun lamps. Their tests show that shining ultraviolet (UV) light on fishmeal degrades its dioxin.
Each time we eat a fish, we incorporate its lifetime accumulation of pollutants. And that’s what makes the new and remarkably simple Danish treatment so intriguing. It holds out the prospect of reducing the dioxin accumulation of farmed, carnivorous fish—potentially to concentrations lower than those in wild-reared kin.
What a minute… If UV light destroys dioxin, then why is it believed to be persistant in the environment?
What a minute… If UV light destroys dioxin, then why is it believed to be persistant in the environment?
Cause it’s underwater where the uv light is filtered out.
Dioxins are primarily formed as a byproduct of incineration. It floats around for hours/days/weeks in the air before settling onto soil, where is sits for days/weeks/months before working its way into the soil or being washed into streams.
So once more, I ask: Why is it believed to be persistant in the environement if UV destroys it?
Of course the answer doesn’t really matter, because dioxin is not particulary toxic to humans. Just more propaganda spread by environmentalists. But then Viktor Yushchenko probably owes his life to this propaganda. If his would-be assissin hadn’t believed the hype of dioxin as “the most dangerous substance known to man,” he or she would have selected a real poison.
I haven’t yet found an environmentalist who believed dioxin was a poison — regardless of how often Smith may say so. The negative effect of any of the dioxin[s] — and there are hundreds — is that they are linked to causing cancer. Most reports define most dioxins to be about as lethal in cancer deaths as cigarette smoking.
That’s “propaganda” spread by the EPA and a whole bunch of doctors. There are even a significant number of VietNam Vets who might agree.
Well if it only causes cancer or is “not particularly toxic” and doesn’t kill me immediately then I guess it’s OK to flood the environment with it. Those useless environmentalists are always causing problems where there aren’t any with their selfish propaganda. I hate people who want clean air and water too.
Teyecoon, I agree with you.
If the Evolution Theorists are right, we should be evolving so that we can only live on polluted air, suffering through extreme UV radiation, and eating food that is the remains of a chemical waste dump.
Seriously though, If they (the Danes) have found a way to reduce the amount of dioxins in fish food that can eventually reduce the amount of dioxins in human diet, this is a good thing. Unless you really do want to eat the remains of a toxic waste dump.
29 years ago, anywhere from 100 to 20,000 grams of dioxin was released during an industrial accident near Seveso, Italy. (Keep in mind that EPA measures dioxin in the environment in picograms.) 37,000 people were exposed to the chemical. Some received doses strong enough to cause chloracne — damn painful, but no one died.
NONE of these people developed cancer attributed to dioxin. They examined this population for every medical anomaly they could think of, and the only one noted was a slight favoring toward female births.
Benzene, which is found in gasoline, is a “known” human carcinogen. (And how many of us have sucked on a hose to siphon gasoline?) Dioxin has only been shown to cause cancer in lab animals, which makes it a “suspected” human carcinogen. There is a huge difference between “known” and “suspected” — as demonstrated by the Seveso accident.
My toxicology professor called dioxin, “the most hazardous substance known to guinea pigs.”
Of course this is just another example of my “head-in-the-sand,” bullheaded bias against environmentalists. If I were enlightened, I would never believe data over environmental hype.
Well, I guess with the Dane’s help fish-eating guinea pigs will be safer the world over!