My apologies for suggesting private e-mail. If anyone has comments or
information about Schecter's dioxin research, please share them with the
whole list.

I did find out something about earlier Schecter work. The following text is
from the Sept-Oct 1986 LLL magazine NEW BEGINNINGS. The article,
"Breastfeeding and Contaminants," was about heptachlor and dioxin. It
pointed out that irresponsible media attention can unnecessarily frighten
many women - sound familiar?

"...Just when the furor over heptachlor began to die down, dioxin
contamination became the center of attention. The controversy began not with
an accident or mishap but with a research paper presented at a meeting of
the American Chemical Society on April 15. Dr. Arnold Schecter, a New York
physician and researcher in the field of environmental contamination,
asserted in his paper that a baby breastfed for one year would receive
eighteen times the recommended lifetime dose of the toxic herbicide dioxin
from his mother's milk. The press, in covering the event, overlooked the
details of the presentation and focused on this one point, reporting the
hypothesis as if it were an established fact, which it was not. Dr.
Schecter's hypothesis was based on his analysis of fatty tissue samples
taken from women during autopsies. He had not tested breast milk for dioxin,
nor had he examined babies or children for evidence of dioxin toxicity. He
had simply estimated possible levels of dioxin in breast milk based on the
amount of dioxin he found in the tissue samples."

"This time the response from national health organizations was immediate.
Within the day the Centers for Disease Control issued a statement pointing
out the errors and inconsistencies of the press reports and disputing Dr.
Schecter's conclusions. The statement said that safe levels of dioxin had
never been established for humans. It also pointed out that "substitutes for
human milk are not entirely free of these compounds and may have higher
metal levels" and added that "the amount of these chemicals present in human
milk does not make a significant contribution to the overall lifetime
exposure in humans...."

LLLI's LEAVEN from May-June 1994 has an article entitled "Pesticides and
Breastfeeding," in which Betty Crase refers to Rogan's research finding that
"Estimated loss of life expectancy from cancer from human milk exposure to
the contaminants studied was less than three days; in contrast, the decrease
in life expectancy from excess postneonatal mortality in infants not
breastfed compared to the increase in life expectancy in breastfed infants
is about seventy days."

Kate Pennington, Newcastle, Maine, getting more & more angry about
irresponsible journalism the more I learn