Food Standards Agency
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Dioxins and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) are present in extremely small amounts in all foods and it is not possible to avoid them.
The small amounts present in the food we eat on a single day are too small to be harmful. But they are absorbed from the food we eat and are stored in fat in the body, with only a small proportion of this total amount excreted every day, which means that the amount builds up over many years.
Risk assessments for dioxins are carried out by comparing intakes from the diet (and other sources) with safety guideline levels established by independent expert scientific committees. Information on the levels of dioxins in our diet and individual foodstuffs is obtained by surveys carried out by the Food Standards Agency.
Dioxins are known to cause a wide variety of toxic effects, including cancer, in laboratory animals when exposed to relatively high levels over a lifetime.
They have also been found to cause reproductive toxicity in laboratory animals. The World Health Organization (WHO) has assessed these risks, including taking into account the mechanism by which dioxins cause cancer.
As a result, the WHO has concluded that dioxins are 'non-genotoxic' carcinogens, for which it is possible to establish a threshold of toxicity, below which there will be no adverse effect upon health.
In 2001, experts advising the WHO set a safety guideline value below the threshold, allowing for some uncertainties in the precise nature of the effects and extrapolation from animals to man.
That guideline is based on protecting people against the harmful effects of dioxins that could occur at the lowest doses, those related to possible risks to the unborn child.
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