tries.
The British government is gradually accepting that dioxins pose real health threats.
In 1994, the Department of Health published a report saying that "despite insufficient evidence for clear causal links", it would be prudent to regard dioxins as possible human carcinogens".
The proposed incineration plants will be needed, it is claimed, to handle the growing mountains of household waste that the EU is banning from landfill sites. In response to the EU directive, the government is expected to announce that by 2020 it will recycle a third of household waste and burn a third.
Some communities are already arguing that these incinerators will pose a health hazard and that money should be spent on more expensive recycling and composting schemes.
Such alternatives, say Friends of the Earth, would be popular, provide more jobs and be easy for people to understand. They say that £250m collected yearly in waste tax could be used to build new recycling centres.
Chris Pilbury, who works with a coalition of 25 community groups in north-east Wales that oppose a massive proposed incinerator and cement kiln expansion scheme near Wrexham, said: "People will not tolerate these risks. Feelings are running high and this report con firms that we are right to to be concerned."
The document, nine years in preparation, says that for those who eat large amounts of fatty meat and dairy produce the risk - on top of any others they may be exposed to - of getting cancer could be as high as one in 100.
Yesterday the EPA said that at least one scientist involved disputed the statistic and that there was a possibility it would be amended before official publication in June. But there will be no dilution of the message of acute concern about dioxins in the report, which for the first time names the most toxic of the group, TCDD (the infamous Agent Orange of Vietnam) as a human carcinogen.
In 1997, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) categorised TCDD as a "known human carcinogen" after analysing the epidemiological evidence. In 1998, the World Health Organisation decided to slash the safe level for human exposure. Even at the new level of between one and four picograms per kilogram of body weight (a picogram is a millionth of a millionth of a gram) - they were still anxious that "subtle effects may already occur in the general population in developed countries".
Cancer is not the only worry, and other health damage from dioxins has been slightly easier to substantiate. The EPA report will link low-grade dioxin exposure to a variety of problems, including hormonal changes and developmental defects in babies. It states: "It is likely that part of the general population is at, or near, exposure levels where adverse effects can be anticipated."
Risk to babies
Rick Hind, the legislative director for Greenpeace's toxics campaign, which yesterday wrote to the EPA demanding a Dioxin emergency action plan, said: "This means that dioxin levels in the bodies of newborn babies are already at levels that put them at risk of serious illness."
There have been concerns for some time about the high levels of dioxins in human breast milk, although environmental and health groups continue to urge women that the risks do not outweigh the benefits of breastfeeding.
Experts from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) and the Cancer Research Campaign (CRC) in London yesterday agreed that dioxins were a cause of anxiety.
"We know that dioxins are in general highly toxic and can cause cancer," said Tim Key of the ICRF cancer epidemiology unit in Oxford. But more is unknown than known.
"The whole area is full of uncertainty and particularly in relation to cancer," said Lesley Walker of the CRC.