Back in the Ukraine

According to Michael Fumento on TechCentral Station, Viktor Yushenko's poison was not as deadly as anti-chemicals activists have claimed. Bizarrely, Mr Yushenko may owe his life to the fact that his would-be murderers believed environmentalist propaganda!

"We don't know of a single person who has ever died of acute dioxin poisoning," says Robert Golden, president of the Maryland-based consulting firm ToxLogic.

It's also terribly rude to say dioxin is not a human carcinogen. The International Agency for Research on Cancer insists it is, and the EPA desperately wants to call it one but its own review panels keep getting in the way.

Yet in addition to the Ranch Hands, we have cancer data from throughout the world concerning workers or townsfolk exposed to dioxin through accidental releases. No type of cancer shows up consistently. As a paper in last December's Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology concluded, "The long-term accumulation of negative, weak, and inconsistent findings suggests that [dioxin] eventually will be recognized as not carcinogenic for humans."

The Ukrainian presidential election second round re-run will take place on December 26.