SO, it turns out that poisonous polychlorinated biphenyls are turning up in our food more often than we thought-and in larger amounts. Should we panic? In a world of nuclear bombs, locust plagues and AIDS, aren鈥檛 there worse things to worry about?
Well, no and yes. PCBs are not the most deadly poison, and they haven鈥檛 even been made since the 1980s. Yet here they are in everyday food in high enough concentrations to damage babies, and we aren鈥檛 even monitoring them. It makes you wonder what else is out there.
PCBs are subtle toxins that accumulate in your fat. They are also hormone mimics, and affect wildlife as well as people. Some women in northern Europe have been found to carry enough PCBs in their breast milk to cause immune, thyroid and clotting disorders in their babies-though babies raised on that breast milk still did better in neurological tests than their bottle-fed peers.
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Clearly, we don鈥檛 want PCBs in our food. Yet we鈥檝e got them. After a scandal in Belgium two years ago, when enough PCBs were dumped into poultry feed to deform chicks, the Belgian government started a system of wide-scale testing. It got a nasty surprise (see 鈥淧oison on your plate鈥�). Lots of food tested did indeed have high levels of PCBs, but the types of PCBs were different from those in the contaminated feed.
So the furore two years ago was over levels of contamination that probably turn up in some of our food a lot of the time-and certainly not just in Belgium. And although the tainted feed incident affected a small amount of food for just four months, it could lead to thousands of cancers and other disorders. What could the wider contamination be doing?
It is a scandal that it took a scandal to reveal this. It is a scandal that the Belgian government is still refusing to find out who was worst affected by the 1999 incident, and monitor their health. And it is time to stop being complacent about these poisons, and get rid of them once and for all. We can鈥檛 clean up PCB-laced sediments. But we can stop feeding leftover PCBs to animals.
Because this is almost certainly where they are coming from. Instead of meat meal laced with BSE, we now feed farm animals North Sea fish meal spiced with PCBs. They get animals fats and scraps from a waste industry that is not regulated like the food industry is. If we鈥檙e going to farm on the scale we do, we must find ways to do it more safely.
