The International Mussel Watch 



International Mussel Watch Committee has received verbal reports of an upward trend in the Baltic 

 Sea biota. 



Industrial production and use data for these chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides, which have 

 a high toxicity and a long persistence in the environment, are difficult to obtain. Often countries 

 and individual corporations categorize these data as proprietary information to protect their 

 economic and political interests. However, despite uncertainty about the data, the presently 

 available information suggests that the production rates of persistent chlorinated pesticides are not 

 decreasing on a global basis. Where several hundred thousand tons of DDT each year were 

 produced and used globally in the 1960's (Goldberg, 1976), annual world production of all 

 persistent chlorinated pesticides today is probably around several million tons. 



Some sense of the use of chlorinated hydrocarbons can be gained from the statistics of 

 small and moderately sized countries. Chile in 1979 utilized 6500 tons of chlorinated hydrocarbon 

 pesticides including 1288 tons of benzene hexachloride and 4400 tons of Aldrin (CPPS, 1981). 

 Ecuador used in 1970 nearly 100 tons of benzene hexachloride and an equal amount of endrin 

 (CPPS, 1981). These are small countries with a high per capita consumption of hard pesticides. 

 Hexachlorocyclohexane has long been extensively manufactured in Japan and mainland China and 

 present environmental levels show that it has clearly been dispersed about the tropics and southern 

 hemisphere (Tanabe et al., 1982). In India alone, the production of benzene hexachloride is 

 around 30,000 tons per year (U.K. Venugopalan, personal communication, 1983). 



These statistics are complemented by levels measured in the atmosphere and oceans. 

 Hexachlorobenzene and hexachlorocyclohexane are usually the dominant halogenated hydrocarbon 

 pesticides in atmospheric samples. Their concentrations over islands in the northern hemisphere 

 (Eniwetok) and in the southern hemisphere (Samoa) are of the same order of magnitude, although 

 somewhat less in Samoa (Atlas and Giam, 1989). Similar atmospheric distributions have been 

 reported for a more extensive set of stations in the Pacific by Dr. S. Tanabe and co-workers 

 (1982) of Ehime University of Japan who also have measured the pesticides in surface seawaters. 

 Richardson and Waid (1982) have indicated a pattern of polychlorinated biphenyl contamination in 

 Australia, similar to that of the Northern hemisphere. 



In 1980-1982, the United Nations Environment Program and the World Health 

 Organization collaborated with the Swedish National Food Administration and developed an 

 assessment of the human exposure to selected organochlorine compounds in human mother's milk 

 (Slorach and Vaz, 1983). This study provides a measure of the global distribution of these 

 compounds in the biosphere and shows that the median levels of the p,p'-DDT reported in the fat 



