* Contamination of food which is not included in the EPA regulations.
* The most reliable written material on PCB and sludge - "Risk Assesment of Polychlorinated Biphenyls" (Nordiska Ministerrådet, Nord 1992:26) says that half or more of our PCB ingestion now comes animal fat.
comes from meat, eggs, milk and cheese. (Page 70). The maximum intak for pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers concerning the consumption of Baltic fatty fish must be augmented with information about PCB in animal and dairy products.
* The same source quotes the impact level for PCB to be around 0,014 mg/kg body weight and day. (Page 77). From this follows that a pregnant woman weighing around 60 Kg must have a lower consumptionof PCB than 1 1 mg/day to not cause damage to the fetus. If we apply a safet factor of 10, the tolerable intake would be 0,1 mg PCB per day.
* the PCB-concentration in Swedish milk has been found to be around 5 mg/kg dairy fat using a PCB- indikator called IUPAC 153, which is equivalent to a PCB-concentration of around 25 mg/kg mjölkfett.
* Consequently a pregnant woman can not drink more than a tenth of a liter milk per day if she wants to make sure that the fetus is not damaged by PCBs. The PCB-concentration in both milk and other animal food are lower than the values quoted by the food and Drug administration which shows that those number are out dated and present high risk compared to the new recomendations from Nord 1992:26.
* Since pregnant swedish women eat more animal food stuff than that quoted as safe, we cannot preclude that newborn babies today are born with damaged central nerv systems from too large amounts of PCB ingested during the pregnancy. Other documented consequences are lower birth weights and increased occurrences of non-Hodkins lymphoma.
* Measured concentrations of PCB in the Swedish population samples of the blood and breast milk support the suspicion that damages have occurred.. (see Hardell et al, Läkartidningen nr 3/97--- Doctors Journal 3/97).
* PCB reaches our pets and animal stock through the feed (hay and crops), where PCB is absorbed from air pollution deposits on the plant skin.
* Precepitation onto the farm soil from airpollution of PCB amounts to around 1 ng/m2 and day. The high concentration of PCBs in sludge (400 mg/kg dry substance) means that the sludge is allowed to carry around 100 times more PCB to the farm land than the precipitation...
* If sludge is prevented to be spread on grazing land it is still not precluded from reaching animal production. It is known that PCB evaporates from the soil, thus results in an increase of airborn PCB which ends up on the above soil part of the plants. (Fries och Marrow 1981).
* All methods available must be employed to lower the PCB-concentration in animal food stuffs.
It is therefore unacceptable to spread sludge to the food production chain for this reason alone since the situation is already critical. Spreading sludge on farmland must stop as soon as we can legally manage it since there may not be enough expertise in the farming population to realize the danger and refuse the practice.