by Catherine Delahunty
This week a Ministry of Health Report came out on the health effects of the dubious remediation at the toxic site in Mapua. The way the Ministry of Health’s media release read, glossed over the risks to the community, which could now be declared negligible.
I only had to read the Executive Summary of the report to get a totally different picture.
The report slams the Ministry for the Environment for failing to protect public heath. It establishes that only a small number of substances—mainly heavy metals—were monitored; it says these would not have had serious health effects.
Scandalously the company and MFE did not monitor the site and its surrounds for the dioxins, PCB’s and other organochlorine compounds that were spread in to the air. Some of these toxic chemicals were actually created by the malfunction of an experimental “clean” technology.
These “chemicals of concern”, as the report calls them, are infamous because there is virtually no safe level of exposure and they bio accumulate in the food chain.
The local people have been told that because there was no monitoring data collected no one knows the level of risk they have been exposed to. Because Dioxins and other dangerous chemicals have a long half-life (some more than 30 years) in the environment and our bodies there can be a wide range of intergenerational health effects—from cancer to reproductive disorders, immune related disease, diabetes and heart failure. While the Ministry of Health is calling for further testing and is working with the community on the issue their media statement mimics the negligence during the clean up has had negligible effects.
The only good thing is that the secret is out. People living through that noise and dust suspected they were being exposed to dangerous chemicals without monitoring, and they were right. What I don’t understand is why the Ministry of Health press releases would pretend this wasn’t true. Who are they trying to protect? Public health or perhaps the agencies responsible for a failed chemical clean up?
Published in Environment & Resource Management by Catherine Delahunty on Thu, March 18th, 2010
Tags: dioxin, heavy metals, mapua, Ministry for the Environment, Ministry of Health, toxics
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on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Sounds like a repeat of the ‘clean-up’ failure at the old Ivan-Watkins-Dow site at Paritutu, New Plymouth.
When will the State take responsibility for allowing these MNC’s (the dioxin producers) to pollute our country?
Ok, so the Government of the day took subsidies from the manufacturers in order to get ‘cheap’ agricultural and industrial chemicals for NZ, believing that what they were doing was necessary for the growth of our industries; but that doesn’t excuse them in future decades from remediation.
Foreign corporations have made billions out of our market; surely some of them can be brought to book for the costs to the NZ population of these dangerous and polluting practices? How much longer is the private pain of individuals going to be swept under the carpet by MNC’s who refuse to acknowledge the toxicity of these compounds?
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The Ministry of Environment probably didn’t do anything because they already knew they’d amongst those groups cut and merged with conservation. It’s That simple
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While authorities may not want to alarm the public they do have a moral duty to warn them of real or possible hazards. Down-playing situations isn’t always the best way to go and in these situations it definitely isn’t.
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What would you expect?
The Food Safety Authority lets GMO’s and things like aspartame into the Food Chain.
The Ministry of Health pushes the pandemic line to sell vaccines that don’t work and actually harm people.
The Govt cuts 25m from the Ministry of Education and destroys Community Education whilst increasing funding to Corrections and 30m to Private Schools.
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I cringe when I think of all the mud fights I had in the estury about 200m downstream from the Mapua factory site. All the exposed skin at the Mapua nudist camp makes one wonder as well.
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jimmy! Me too! (the mud fights, sloshing around, hauling ourselves through the foul stuff – not so much the nudism)!
(Explains my third eye, I suppose).
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