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NUCLEAR
NEWS FOR LIFE
ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM |
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EXCERPT FROM First, Do No Harm Reducing the Medical Waste Threat to Public Health and the Environment
If you have to be hospitalized in the United States it's
going to run you (or your insurance company) about 930 bucks a day, on
average. Would you be willing to pay 93 cents more--that's right, 93 cents,
not much more than you'd pay for a candy bar down at the gift shop--so
that the hospital you're in could "afford" to stop polluting the air with
one of the most potent toxic substances known to science?
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Major Findings in "First, Do No Harm"
Medwaste and Dioxin. Dioxin is created as a by-product in many industrial processes including waste incineration. EPA has determined that medical waste incinerators are among the top two or three sources of dioxin contamination. Few chemicals cause such a wide variety of effects, and none exhibit dioxin's astonishing toxicity--the ability to cause damage at doses almost too low to measure. There is no safe level of exposure to dioxin.
Implications for Children, Poor People, People of Color.
Pollutants emitted by medwaste incinerators have been shown to contaminate the environment at great distances from the source. EPA has not determined if children, people of color or low income Americans may be at special risk by virtue of living near medwaste incinerators. We were able to develop a precise geographic location for 1,348 health care institutions that have recently been issued incineration permits according to the EPA. When we analyzed these locations against 1990 U.S. Census data we found: