[Corvettaholic]

Did you guys hear about what happened to the Ukrainian candidate after the election scandal? He's showing major signs of dioxin poisoning. Man that sucks. How long does that take to break down anyway? It somehow resulted in massive acne and a lot of "sick" kind of symptoms. Surprised he's still alive...

[Mitch]

Dioxin is fat soluble and really there is no way I know of for it to get out of your system at least not anytime soon. The scary thing is dioxin is such a simple molecule to make, we may see more dioxin poisonings in the future.

[movies]

There was a grad student who made a ton of different dioxin analogues in grad school (circa 1957) was still alive and well, last I heard, although he suffered from severe chloracne.

It's not readily metabolized by mammals and mainly concentrates in the liver.  It'll probably be a while until he starts to recover.  Fortunately, everything I have read seems to suggest that dioxin isn't especially lethal to humans (although it's 10,000 times more lethal to mice than cyanide is).

Mitch is right, I doubt we've seen the last dioxin poisoning, especially now that it is back in the spotlight.  If you didn't know, TCDD ("dioxin") was found to be a significant impurity in a lot of the "Agent Orange" that was produced during the Viet Nam war and then caused a lot of problems for those who were exposed.  It doesn't seem that it causes birth defects and the like in humans (at least the humans exposed to Agent Orange in Viet Nam), although it causes severe birth defects in rats.

[AWK]

http://www.michigan.gov/documents/Dioxin_72078_7.pdf

[angiems]

I know this is a bit late, but you guys don't seem to do much business over here.  I was just reading up on the link that AWK posted, and did you all notice that it has a half-life of 8.5 years???  And that chloracne lasting for 10 years... shiiit.