Review: Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy By Joe Thornton Reviewed by Dale Stirling Intertox, Inc., USA Joe Thornton. Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. 599 pp. ISBN 0-262-20124-0. Organochlorines are an abundant presence in our lives. The introduction of chlorine chemistry in the 20th century has tremendously impacted how we live and work. At the same time, the ubiquitous nature of organochlorines has affected human health, wildlife, and the environment. In this wide- ranging book, the author takes the chlorine industry to task as well as traditional science for not managing the threats posed by organochlorines to our health and the environment. The book consists of three parts and eleven chapters ending with several appendices, notes, references, and an index. In Part One, The Problem: A Global Health Hazard, the author focuses on the failure of the risk paradigm, which includes risk assessment, toxicology, epidemiology, and other scientific and engineering tools, to manage organochlorines. Chapter One, Organochlorines Around the World, focuses on the pervasiveness of organochlorines in our lives. Thornton notes that even though the current regulatory environment is based on the concept that toxic chemicals tend to stay local, evidence shows that pollutants do not stay where we put them (p. 23). He demonstrates this by describing the resistance of organochlorines to degradation and their corresponding persistence in air, water, and soil and their bioaccumulation in human and animal tissue and foods. The author singles out some well-known organochlorines including various PCBs and some dioxins and furans. Chapter Two, First Class Poisons: The Toxicology of Organochlorines, first reviews the effect of organochlorines on animal and human health. That is followed by a discussion on why some organochlorines are more toxic than others. The largest portion of this chapter reviews why organochlorines are toxic. The issue of threshold limit values for organochlorines is briefly examined as are chemical mixtures, genetic mutations, endocrine disruption, and neurotoxicity. Moving away from science, the author discusses the impact of political interests on how threshold values are set. He also illustrates a key problem in organochlorine regulation-data is not available on the more than 11,000 organochlorines in commerce as well as their byproducts. Chapter Three, The Damage Done: Health Impacts in People and Wildlife, examines how organochlorines have caused large-scale damage to human and