With the barest trickle of information seeping beneath the
closed-door investigation into the UPL chemical disaster in Durban, the public
is still in the dark about health impacts and exposure levels from airborne
toxic chemical exposure. But studies on people and animals exposed to several
of these chemicals point to significant health problems that could potentially
extend several generations into the future.
Viktor Yushchenko was on the point of gaining power as
president of Ukraine in 2004 when he became seriously ill and was flown to
Austria for specialist treatment. He was poisoned deliberately, possibly by
Russian agents.
Medical experts later determined that the poison was a
highly toxic chemical known as 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD).
TCDD is a colourless, odourless but highly toxic dioxin, one
of several by-products of a wide range of manufacturing and heating processes
including smelting, chlorine bleaching of paper pulp and the manufacturing of
some herbicides and pesticides.
Yuschenko survived, but was left with a severely disfigured
face, with his skin bloated and pockmarked by chloracne (a severe form of acne
linked to exposures to dioxins).
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