Why the War on Dioxin Costs More Lives Than Dioxin Itself, 1990 Environmental Conference Proceedings

The discovery of dioxin in paper products, incinerator emissions, paper mill effluents and the ambient environment inevitably requires an assessment of potential risk to public health. In many cases the risk assessment results indicate that such potential risks may exist. The magnitude of predicted risks depends in large part upon the assumptions made about dioxin’s carcinogenicity. This paper uses recent data and reinterpretation of existing evidence about dioxin’s carcinogenicity and presents the impacts of different assumptions about carcinogenicity on predicted risks. The paper estimates the costs associated with the estimation of potential risks and the actions taken to reduce them. The costs are shown to be greater than those associated with other regulations and equal to those associated with rules that have been proposed but not adopted. Reallocation of the money spent on dioxin to other areas that pose public health risks would be of much greater benefit to public health.