Eggsamine What You Eat

When you look for a bride/groom for your son/daughter you look into the antecedents of the whole family carefully. When you admit your child to school you check the best possible educational centre. When you give your clothes to a tailor you find out the best tailor. When you buy a car you look for the best possible make. So why don't you apply the same rigorous procedures to the most important thing in the world – the food you eat? Where do you get your eggs from? The shop down the road. Do you know which poultry they come from or what the chickens have eaten or how they are kept?

Of course not, an egg is an egg, you will say. No it is not. An egg is the menstrual blood of a hen and its shell is not a shell but a porous skin that contains this blood. And eggs differs vastly depending on how the chicken has been kept and what it has been fed. Most eggs contain dioxins. What is a dioxin? It is a group of 210 chemical compounds so poisonous and so harmful to man that an international convention was called in Stockholm some years ago to eliminate their production. It is a POP, a Persistent Organic Pollutant , which means that it stays in your body for years and destroys it by blocking the hormones.

 Every egg you eat affects your unborn child as well as change the genetic structure of the cells. From cancer, skin disease, nervous system disorders to miscarriages and deformity in your child, a lowered learning and a low ability to fight infections – the egg is a culprit. A short term exposure can result in patchy darkening of the skin, and altered liver function Dioxins are passed from mother to infant across the placenta and through breastfeeding In 1992, EPA concluded that dioxin exposure of mammals including humans shortly before or shortly after birth are most likely to impair intellectual development and the immune system.

You cannot taste dioxins in contaminated eggs. They build up in your body over time. The EPA's most recent report concluded that the cancer risk from dioxin is now as high as one in one hundred people. Dioxin was declared a Class 1 carcinogen, or "known human carcinogen," by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an arm of the World Health Organization, in February, 1997. Its non-cancer dangers loom larger each year. After studying dioxin intensely for a decade, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says "There is adequate evidence from studies in human populations as well as in animals and from ancillary experimental data to support the inference that humans are likely to respond with a plethora of effects from exposure to dioxin and related compounds."

The US government has volumes of data showing that dioxin harms wildlife and humans at exceedingly low levels. There is no "threshold" dose - the tiniest amount can cause damage, and our bodies have no defence against it. The effects are not limited to one generation but can be seen over generations. An international bureau called the International POPs Elimination Network(IPEN)made of 350 350 public interest organizations working to eliminate POPs, hunts these chemicals down all over the world. In a recent survey , eggs were tested in 17 countries including India .IPEN found that chicken eggs in India carry among the highest level of dioxins in the world - five and a half times the amount of dioxin permitted by the European Union. Indian eggs have five times the amount of dioxins than even those found in the most hazardous places in other countries – dumpsites, near chemical plants and almost two-fold higher than those seen in eggs from near municipal waste incinerators. The eggs from all over the world were tested at AxysVerilaba, a Czech laboratory which tests WHO (World Health Organisation) standards.

There is no Indian government guideline on where poultries can be setup. There are guidelines on how the chickens should be kept and what they should be fed but no one has ever read these rules and food inspectors exist only to take bribes. The miserable condition of poultries is clear from the fact that almost every poultry in the country has massive outbreaks of cholera and salmonellosis regularly. There are no guidelines on where eggs should be sold – which is important since the skin is porous and absorbs atmospheric chemicals immediately. Recently the Chhatisgarh High Court has declared eggs to be non vegetarian and has given strict orders on where they can be sold – but those orders merely place them in meat markets. The Stockholm Convention 2001 on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) is the first global, legally binding instrument whose aim is to protect human health and the environment by controlling production, use and disposal of toxic chemicals.

Ninety-seven countries have ratified the convention . Typically, India signed the convention in 2002 but has still to ratify. Ratification would make us eligible for financial support and technical assistance for reduction and gradual phase out of POPs in the country but why should the bureaucrats care about that. Dioxins are created when garbage, plastics, metals, treated wood, and other materials are burned or when certain chemicals, such as wood preservatives, are made and during many industrial activities such as copper smelting, burning of waste, chemical manufacturing ,paper pulp bleaching, production and disposal of PVC plastic and pesticide manufacture. Forest fires and automobile exhaust are minor sources of dioxins. Solid waste incinerators are the worst culprits Dioxins are only found in animal food products including meat, milk, cheese, butter, eggs, and fish. They are not found in fruit and vegetables. Why? Because dioxins are only stored in fat and both fruit and vegetables have none.

According to WHO, over 90% of our exposure to dioxins is through food, with major sources including beef, dairy products, milk, chicken, pork, fish and eggs. Dioxins travel long distances in the atmosphere via air currents. Rain, snow and dust carry them to the ground. They enter the food chain when animals graze on dioxin-contaminated plants and soil .Chickens eat soil. These chemicals are then stored in the chicken fat. Even if the earth has very low levels of dioxins the eggs will still be contaminated . There is no rural area today which is not exposed to industrial emissions/waste contaminants.

The study collected eggs from chickens bred near medical waste incinerators, cement kilns, the metallurgical industry, municipal waste dumps, and chemical production facilities involving chlorine , metal smelting and pulp/paper factories, thermal plants, old pesticide sites In 1998 WHO convened a consultation in Geneva to evaluate the tolerable daily dose of dioxins to which a human can be exposed without harm. The Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) has been fixed at 1 to6 picogrammes/kilogram body weight or one part per trillion. In actual terms what is your intake. One trillionth part of a gram is the acceptable limit. This is 0.0006 picograms. The amount found in each Indian egg was 10.9 parts per gram. Which means that an adult eating eggs , milk and meat would ingest 300 to 600 the acceptable limit of dioxins per day. Just one egg alone would give him 0.018 gms per month and 0.216 gms per year. And dioxins stays in the body for 7years so it keeps accumulating. Somebody who has eaten an egg everyday during 30 days, will have app. 20% more dioxin in the body than before .

Although this study represents the first data about POPs in eggs from India, evidence of dioxin in the food chain is not new. In a study by Senthil Kumar et.al in 2001 the levels of dioxins were analysed in the tissues of humans, fishes, chicken, lamb, goat, predatory birds, river dolphins collected from various locations around the country. The dioxin levels in human tissues ranged from 170 to 1300 pg/g . The easiest thing for me to do is to recommend that India ratify the Stockholm Convention and start cleaning up its dioxins and waste management. Waste incineration must be replaced by clean production and product substitution.

I could say that the government should make guidelines for poultry factories and animal feed and see that they are enforced. Food contamination monitoring systems must be in place to ensure that tolerance levels are not exceeded. When incidents of contamination are suspected, we should be able to identify and dispose of unsafe food. I could say that we should establish laboratories (We don't even have a lab that can measure dioxins in ashes, soil, water or food) and make egg testing mandatory for all egg sellers.

I could say that if you are an egg eater , test yourself and if you find dioxin levels high, send the bill to the National Egg Producers Council who carry on about how one egg a day is important for " brain development" . But since you know that none of the above will be done and that food safety is not even on the government agenda and that you will never know where your eggs came from and whether the chickens roamed within miles of dumps, waste incinerators, kilns, metal works, hospitals, factories and chemical facilities , don't eat eggs. Or any animal product.
 
- Maneka Gandhi