The Belgian PCB/Dioxin Incident: A Critical Review of Health Risks Evaluations.

摘要

The Belgian PCB/dioxin incident is a food contamination that occurred in Belgium in January 1999 when a tank of recycled fats used to produce animal feeds was accidentally contaminated by approximately#10; 100 L of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) oil containing 50 kg PCBs expressed as the sum of the seven markers, 1 g (TEQ) dioxins (PCDD/Fs) and 2 g toxic equivalent (TEQ) dioxin-like PCBs. The incident was#10; discovered when a poultry poisoning resembling the classic chick edema disease broke out in several farms that had received contaminated feeds. The delay in making public this incident resulted in a major#10; political and food crisis and caused much concern in the population. We review here the health risk evaluations that were made after this incident and we assess the likelihood of the different scenarios#10; by taking into account recent data on the real scale of the contamination and on the dioxin body burden of the general population in Belgium. These new data confirm that the incident was