Historical Perspective
Low concentrations of dioxins existed in nature prior to industrialization as a result of natural combustion and geological processes. Dioxins were first unintentionally produced as by-products from 1848 onwards as Leblanc process plants started operating in Germany. The first intentional synthesis of chlorinated dibenzodioxin was in 1872. Today, concentrations of dioxins are found in all humans, with higher levels commonly found in persons living in more industrialized countries. The most toxic dioxin, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), became well known as a contaminant of Agent Orange, a herbicide used in the Vietnam War. To speed up chemical reactions, the U.S. manufacturers (mainly Monsanto) had increased the temperature in the process of preparation. This increased the concentration of TCDD many times more than other types of pesticides that were being used by U.S. farmers. Later, dioxins were found in Times Beach, Missouri and Love Canal, New York and Seveso, Italy. More recently, dioxins have been in the news with the poisoning of President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine in 2004, the Naples Mozzarella Crisis the Irish pork crisis of 2008, and the German feed incident of 2010.
Read more about this topic: Polychlorinated Dibenzodioxins
Famous quotes containing the words historical perspective, historical and/or perspective:
“Reason, progress, unselfishness, a wide historical perspective, expansiveness, generosity, enlightened self-interest. I had heard it all my life, and it filled me with despair.”
—Katherine Tait (b. 1923)
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“The fact that illness is associated with the poor—who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one’s midst—reinforces the association of illness with the foreign: with an exotic, often primitive place.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)