Document RaDOXnEJmjKwOmE03Yr0JKwO7

dl.i' dluati i]rrali ' MIASII. FLA. o, Si.',Oiir. m:,, .! ,'3.oto fes 15 is: r~> nrn? L<n\ Lo-msaa isLPijJl g <5 TT To Be TALLAHASSEE -- (AP) -- DDT has hivn getting the blame for a number of ccologSeal disasters, but the r? 1 cclpri: may be a chemical cousin -- polychlorinated biphenyl*, (PCS) says the director of the State Pesti* cide Residue Laboratory, "The research work is so new on it you hate to point your finder and say this is the problem, instead of this DDT problem," said lab chief Doyle Golden. "I wish this wore six months later where we would have more conclu sions to draw." Assuming that Golden's suspicions -- whih he bared beforo a House Subcommit tee on Hard Pesticides last week -- are confirmed, the implications arc great. PCDS ARE commonly used In the manufacture of a wide variety of products, including plastics, sealers, printing Inks, waxes and adhesives. Many of the food products sold on supermarket shelves arc wrapped in plastics con taining PCBs. "PCBs are generally recog nized as safe for man. How I > ri'<f5L^P&.fICSlI CJ ever, they are being evalu ated hy the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of Agriculture as well as num erous state labs for their toxicity," Golden said. It is known that PCBs are toxic to certain species of animals. They were blamed for some fish kills last year. "WE FOUND an extremely lugh level of PCBs in some of the fishes and animals in the fish kills at Escambia Bay," said Bill Woods of the Game and Fresh Water Fish Com mission. He said the problem was traced to lubricants used at a Monsanto Co. plant which, irdnicallyTTsThe major manu facturer of PCBs, but at another location. PCBs. as Golden and Woods explained it, are ex tremely similar to DDT, in chemical structure and in their environmental behavior. LIKE DDT, they said. PCBs are alow to breakdown and disappear and they con centrate in the tissues of anmial.s that cat them. From such evidence -- as well as harder data gathered in the pesticide residue lab -- Golden bases his theory that many of the damages attributed to DDT and other pesticides arc redly 'caused by PCBs. As an Agriculture Depart ment employe he has an obvious interest in pesticides, but his theory is supported -- at least tentatively -- by Air and Water Pollution Control Department chemist Jay Carver. "I THINK the way it's growing a lot of the blame that DDT is getting is going to show up to belong to the PCBs," Carver said. "1 can't really say that for sure be cause not enough work has been done on it." The laboratory evidence that has influenced Golden's thinking occurred during gas chromatograph tests for pes ticide residues in food prod ucts. "What threw me on this whole thing was that all of a sudden the levels of DDT that our laboratory was find ing was going up and yet tho use of DDT was or. a steady decline," he said. THE chromatograph rec ords DDT in jagged peaks on graph paper. Golden said that PCBs show up in almost cxrutly lhe sr ;.*.? ^atlcrri. "I quesTnn much nf the work on DDT," he said. "There is some work which is of cuer.t'or.ablc nature since the reports of their findings match so tiosolv with those perks that match so closely with the pesti cides," he said. He said DDT andvsis must be considered highly ques tionable unless samples arc first put through an elaborate clean-up process to remove PCDs. Many scientists are now doing so. . PC5S r.\TER the environ ment j./.-.agh disposal of products that contain the compounds. Golden ss id. They can bo distributed through incineration, he said, but a far more common way is through effluents into waterways from : treatment plants. "Wc have fount! our high est concentrations of DDT near the industrial -- munici pal runoffs," Colder, said. The state of research on PCBs being r.s primitive as it is, he said that it is just not known at this time if they will turn into a pollution problem as serious as pesti- MQNS 029017 "LETS PUT ourselves back 20 virus ago \v:;h DDT." Golden said. "We arc in the same place now \v.;r. PCBs that we were then w.t.t DDT." Developed during ::c re search boom insoirrci hv World War 1! DDT it; use for about 15 years before people first became \'.d;iy alarmed about its -otrut:.-: danger following puhke.-.'ion of Rachel Carson's book "The Silent S'/v.'.'g" l.\ r'.'.c cariy sixties.