just when you thought it was safe to burn bovines...

[Guest guest]

LONDON - Britain's foot and mouth pyres are creating more lethal pollutants than all the country's most toxic factories combined, The Independent said yesterday.

It said unpublished government figures showed that in the six weeks to April 6, in which some 500,000 animals have been burned, 63 grams of deadly dioxins have been emitted.Dioxins are carcinogens 1,000 times more lethal than arsenic, and a suspected cause of birth defects, the newspapersaid. The World Health Organisation recommends that the average-sized person should be exposed to no more than around 30 billionths of a gram each year.Britain's most polluting factories produce around 88 grams in a year. At any one time the pyres, a familiar site in parts of the country since the start of the epidemic, produce far more dioxins than these factories, the newspaper said.It said the amount produced by the pyres was enough to deliver a dangerous dose to more than two billion people.The figures came from a study carried out for the Department of Transport, Environment and the Regions by AEA Technology's National Environment Technology Centre, the newspaper said.Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth campaigns director, was quoted by the newspaper as saying: "Releases on this scale could provide farmers with a dreadful double whammy. After losing their livestock because of foot and mouth, they may find their farms heavily contaminated and unusable as a result of the Government's short-sighted obsession with slaughter."The news came as protesters marched on Saturday on Downing Street to call for an end to the Government's foot-and-mouth slaughter policy.Foot and mouth disease has been confirmed at over 1,400 sites in the United Kingdom.