Modern risks: Food
Farm and harm: four cases based on food production
A health warning: I researched these pieces in the mid and late
90s: people quoted may have changed their views since. I haven't.
The evidence, too, may have moved on without my spotting it. This
entire site is a work in progress: its evidence is offered in good
faith and comments are welcome.
(1) BSE
(2) GMOs
(3) Organophosphates
(4) Pesticides, cancer and gender-benders
Footnotes
1) BSE
[This was written years before the October, 2000 publication
of the Phillips BSE report which sugested, for instance, that BSE
in cattle is a cattle-to-cattle, not a sheep-to-cattle, infection
as suggested below]
The last decade has seen man's relations with animals and plants
assume a wholly new importance. We have had to adjust to a revolution
in our ability to manipulate their very beings. We are bound to
feel unease about the consequences, and have already come to believe
ourselves damaged by the process. BSE has been a watershed in our
thinking.
In truth, though, animals have always contributed mightily to the
diseases and illnesses man suffers. Leaving aside the role of rats
as vectors of diseases which arise because rodents opportunistically
share our lives, our use of animals for food has conspired with
hygiene and culinary issues to make us the victims of bugs that
pass between the species.
There has always been a cycle of microbial infection passed, and
intensified, between animals and us. In that sense, the food scares
surrounding, say, cheese - especially the listeria scares of the
late 80s - were really completely normal. And then there were the
campylobacter scares, and others involving faecal matter from animals
infecting us by various routes. Even salmonella in chickens, which
caused a tremendous brouhaha nearly a decade and a half ago, is
really an ordinary sort of infective issue: a quite normal bug which
could arise at any time in a flock of hens and which turns out to
be damaging to us but not to them. Some of these problems risk being
intensified by careless antibiotic use, either in animals or humans,
and the rules governing the use of antibiotics by farmers have recently
been tightened-up. But the seriousness of that part of the issue
is deeply controversial [1].
All these infective agents are fascinating, and their effects are
arguably intensified by modern practices. But we also see a much
newer sort of concern. We see an increasing unease about specifically
modern techniques of farming animals and plants.
The most glaring example is BSE, the scrapie-like disease in cattle
which seems to have transferred itself from sheep into cows, and
thence, in a slightly altered form, into humans. As the 90s rolled
on, it became harder and harder to make a watertight case against
giving up eating beef. Indeed, renouncing beef was probably a more
rational response than my own, which was to eat more of the stuff.
These things are a matter of temperament. Mine directed me to dislike
and defy scare-mongering.
Still, once we had found in 1986 that some cows were suffering
from Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy it was clear that there was
a question mark over England's iconic lunch. The trouble is that
this is not saying very much: for several years no-one really knew
whether the problem would becomes serious in humans at all. Even
now, the matter will not finally be settled for years, because BSE-type
diseases have long incubation periods.
There have been many revelations about the BSE epidemic in cattle
and people, and they are at the moment emerging not least because
of the kind of public inquiry which the British are very good at
[It is due to report this year, 2000]. One important message of
the case is one which the press will studiously ignore: that this
is the most open society in the world. With rather little fuss,
the affairs of state come under intense scrutiny whenever anything
goes wrong.
Speculation about any wrong-headedness or worse amongst politicians
will probably put commentators and their public off the scent of
the most important issue. Irrespective of what they said or advised,
was the regulation of the crisis well or badly done?
From the start of the BSE outbreak, the Government got almost everything
about right. The Ministry of Agriculture did preliminary research.
The scientific great and good were corralled under the chairmanship
of Sir Richard Southwood and reported first in 1988 and then 1989.
Southwood reviewed MAFF's evidence, and plotted the rules on cattle
feed which were likely - consistent with the known facts, and intelligent
hypotheses - to make sure that cattle did not receive any more of
the likely infective agent, or pass it on to humans. The scientific
judgements which were made were immediately exposed to inquisition
by other scientists and the media. Journalists of every complexion
interrogated the scientists (those on the official committee and
their critics alike) very rigorously. I remember being anxious that
the judgements had to be made on fairly shaky and incomplete evidence,
but also thinking that the right things had been done. Southwood
agreed with the Government scientists' assessment that it was "most
unlikely" that there would be problems for beef-eaters, but
added that that if he and they were wrong "the implications
would be extremely serious". Quite. I went on eating beef.
Nothing much has changed in the intervening years. The original
thinking about the cause of the outbreak probably remains broadly
sound. The main "official" theory suggests that bits of
sheep infected with scrapie (which is like BSE) were fed to cows.
Only a change in the market meant the stuff wasn't being pressure-cooked,
a development no-one considered important at the time.
It may turn out that feeding the relatively uncooked remains of
sheep to cows was only part of the story. Some witnesses to the
inquiry believed that it was increases in the sheer bulk of animal
protein which was fed to cattle which made the difference. It may
be that the cow herd was infected with scrapie-like organisms anyway,
but that these intensified to the point of becoming clinically evident
with the new practices. It may even be, as has been claimed most
controversially by Mark Purdey, an organic dairy farmer, that OPs
reduced cows' immunity to the organism (see organophosphate link).
So we may end up wishing we had banned OPs on those grounds.
But the scientists were within their rights to suppose that people
probably wouldn't get infected even now that cows were. People had
been eating the scrapie organism for centuries without problems.
Anyway, and even though the risks of inaction seemed small, the
feeding practice was actually stopped and the organs thought to
be capable of carrying the disease were (fairly efficiently though
by no means as thoroughly as was required) removed from the human
food chain, whether they came from infected cows or not. There has
always been far too much political effort to reassure the public
on this matter, but there certainly wasn't a systematic cover-up
or even much incaution in the government's approach.
The inquiry may settle on the view that some officials did not
encourage research or publicity as they should have; there may be
criticisms about the handling of relations between the farming and
health ministries. There is some evidence that different parts of
various ministries were not as frank as they might have been. But
any scientists who now claims that his or her work was suppressed
needs to consider whether they acted with ordinary courage in staying
quiet at the time. In a world in which journalists are well accustomed
to receiving nods and winks from scientists and officials all over
the official and semi-official system, anyone who had a serious
anxiety about the way things were going could have got their message
out into the open.
In any case it will probably also turn out that their failures,
whatever they were, produced rather small additional risks to those
incurred by the original failure to notice - what probably no-one
could have noticed - that feeding practices were allowing an organism
to multiply.
BSE is often cited as a case of unnatural practices bringing about
a new disease, whose incidence is in some sense deserved by innovative
man. There is much talk about how we should have known that feeding
material derived from animals to a vegetarian animal was bound to
give rise to difficulties.
This argument is very flawed. Man has suffered zoonotic disease
throughout his consumption of meat and animal products, but he has
also suffered disease from his vegetable intake. Eating animals
is probably more risky, simply because it is more complex, and because
faecal matter, flesh and juices are such good conveyers of micro-organisms.
Yet the BSE case really arises only because of a misunderstanding
we made about the nature of the proteinous material we were feeding
cattle. It is true that we put the cattle in the way of getting
a zoonotic disease, but they are not strangers to zoonotic diseases,
and would have been so even in the wild, and even without this change
in their habits which made them carniverous and cannibalistic. Obviously,
we need to be careful, but there is no reason to suppose that we
have flouted some simple rule, some simple principle, of importance.
Rather, we have taken an unwitting risk, as we must from time to
time, and some people have suffered very horribly because of it.
But we have not taken a different class of risk than is inevitable,
nor have we been any slower to learn from our mistakes than might
be expected of extremely intelligent and observant people.
(2) GMOs (Top)
We find the same difficulty as we move toward an increasing
dependence on biotechnologies and genetic engineering.
The green movement has grasped this new opportunity vigorously
(see my paper on GMOs, at "Links"). Here is a new technology
to replace the nuclear fear as a bogey appropriate to our age. With
his nuclear technologies, man had got into the engine-room of the
physical world, the atom, and produced technologies which were obviously
powerful. Now, science has delivered a technology which has its
hands on the gene, one of the main levers of the engine-room of
life itself.
The parallels are irresistible, but they are flawed. Nuclear fission
always and inevitably involves hugely powerful forces which inevitably
need containment and constant management. But biotechnologies are
rather different. They certainly need careful development, but there
is a strong chance that they can be developed with many and widespread
benefits and rather small disadvantages. Not least of the differences
is that the biotechnologies are being explored in a crucible of
debate, investigation and regulation quite unlike anything seen
before. For instance, the American chemicals and life-sciences company,
Monsanto, one of the main protagonists, has been maintaining a website
on which it posts a wide range of disinterested and partisan information
on the matter, as well as providing hot-links through to many other
sources of information and opinion.
On this site, one comes across a New Scientist article (31.10.1998)
in which the industry's strongest and most persistent critic, Jeremy
Rifkin, outlines his opposition:
"Genetic engineering is going to produce chemicals, building
materials, plastics, fibres, new sources of energy as well as drugs
and vaccines. Watch the industry. It is very impressive what has
happened. In the past year, Monsanto, Novartis, Hoescht Chemical
in Germany and Du Pont have all made a decision to shed or sell
parts of their chemical divisions. They are all life science companies
now. For them, the metamorphosis is to genetic commerce.... I use
the new term "genetic pollution". I think it is going
to gain currency very quickly. We need to look at the scale of what
is happening. Right now, the life science companies are introducing
scores of genetically engineered organisms into experimental field
tests and several into commercial production.... It is the scale
that is important. Thousands of introductions propagating in land,
water and air over the next twenty years: the life sciences companies
want to have the land full of genetically engineered crops, both
food and pharmaceuticals, in less than 10 years. But have they addressed
the issue of whether genetic pollution can spread ? .... The obvious
first problem is build-up of herbicide resistance in weeds. Instead
of spraying here and there infrequently, you actually have that
herbicide-resistant gene in your crop so you can spray and kill
everything in sight without killing your crop. If you are putting
a herbicide-resistant gene in every cell of every plant over millions
of acres, you certainly up the ante for the emergence of resistant
strains of weed.
..... But what if genes jump between species ? The scientific community
once said that was absurd. Now we are beginning to weigh the evidence.
Danish studies of a herbicide-resistant gene show that during pollination
it will jump easily over long distances."
On their website, the Royal Society (Britain's most prestigious
science body), posted the deliberations of its own task force on
biotechnology, and it is interesting to see how all the points Rifkin
raises are indeed covered, but from a position which, whilst not
relaxed and certainly not cavalier, strongly implied that these
biologists believed that a step-wise advance could be made. Wholesale
escapes to the wild were unlikely; monster genes were improbable.
Interestingly, the firms themselves might well find it in their
own commercial interests to develop technologies which went toward
systematic environmental safety for their products:
"In the past few years,", wrote Martin Brookes in the
New Scientist (31.10.1998), "patents have been issued for techniques
linking 'suicide' genes to DNA 'switches' that can be tripped inside
pollen cells, wrecking their development, and also for techniques
based on genes that kill off hybrid seeds as they attempt to germinate.
Some companies even aim to turn crop fertility into a trait that
can be switched on or off with sprays. 'We are going to see a lot
more of this technology,' says [Arnold] Foudin, assistant director
of scientific services at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA):
'Not that environmental protection is the engine driving this push.
Far from it. Companies see the control of plant fertility as the
key to preventing growers from pirating their technology. As long
as crops remain fertile, there is a risk that growers will secretly
use transgenic seed which they have saved from the last season.
If that happens, company profits will take a dive.
'At present, not all plants are amenable to sterility engineering.
But there's no denying that if it is perfected, engineering sterility
would be an effective way of laying to rest the spectre of the transgenic
superweed. Then, what's good for the company coffers might also
be good for the environment.
'This puts opponents of biotechnology in something of a bind. They
see the new sterility technologies as an attack on the age-old rights
of farmers to save and store harvested seed. Yet they also complain
about the risks of "genetic pollution"'."
It really is very unlikely that this technology will go away, and
it is surely in nearly everyone's interests to find an intelligent
way of legislating it into existence with as much regard to the
real risks and benefits associated with it as is sensible and proportional
to the risks and benefits we can see.
It is of course right that campaigners should seek to remind people
that "progress" can have an undeserved imperative. For
Jeremy Rifkin, this seems very important:
"The life sciences industry may find it difficult to believe
that its agenda could be rejected but remember that the baby-boom
generation rejected nuclear power, the crown jewel of 20th-century
physics. When I was growing up in the 1950s that would have been
unthinkable."
There are of course difficulties with this example. It may be that
we should be developing more nuclear power, rather than seeking
to turn our back on it. But in any case, these new biological technologies
are being developed with a degree of questioning which simply never
arose with nuclear. That is why it is perverse of its opponents
to inveigh against the new technologies as though only the critics
stood between the companies and a hedge-to-hedge, sea-to-sea ocean
of GMOs.
Whilst eco-warriors in 1998 dug up fields of GMO trials, the Government's
own independent watch-dog was cautiously reassessing one controversial
case of a field-full of modified oil seed rape which was quite near
an organic crop, whose owners were required to be free of GMO "infection".
The Government's independent Advisory Committee on Releases to the
Environment (ACRE) thought the adjacent fields of non-engineered
crops might be "infected" by the GMOs at the rate of one
plant for every 40,000. That was, they thought, a baddish case,
and not an alarming one. It was computed before they were told that
the GMO field and the vulnerable organic fields were much further
apart than at first thought. The point here is that infection by
GMOs is no worse, and in this case no more likely, than infection
by any other sort of seed. It was believed to be fairly easy to
compute the odds - the risks - at issue. This is the sort of pragmatic,
nuanced thinking which will probably feed the new billions soon
to join the planet. It will probably keep us tolerably safe too.
Things will go wrong, but they are unlikely to be catastrophic.
Indeed, rather like nuclear risks, they will probably turn out to
be surprisingly small, and surprisingly similar, to the natural
risks we must take anyway.
(3) Organophosphates (Top)
Two of the most famous cases of modern risks going badly awry are
the cattle disease, BSE, and its appearance now in humans, and nervous
diseases supposedly caused by organophosphates used as sheep dips.
It is instructive that they are very different cases. For a start,
BSE is an agent which may have jumped the species barrier between
sheep and cows, and then jumped another, into people. With OPs,
we have a pretty normal form of potential contamination of the human
system by an industrial chemical, which gets to us - in this case
- because of the farmer's working practices. The sheep is not itself
the vector a disease, either in harbouring it or in passing it to
us.
There are, though, similarities. In both, the supposed poisoning
of people is believed by many to have been in effect covered up.
The evidence about both has accumulated with time, and government
has had to react to uncertainty, in very similar ways. What is more,
in the case of OP poisoning, it would take only a little more evidence
to wrong-foot the government's long-running view and policy on the
matter. It could, for instance, be that we are now, in 1999, in
the same position with respect to OPs that we were in very early
1996 about BSE. This is a sleeper which might yet became a dynamite
issue.
Already, in the past three or four years, many shepherds have dramatically
changed their practices. They are no longer dipping their sheep
with organophosphates (OPs). Unease about the chemicals has spread.
The OPs are wonderfully toxic against the army of mites (which produce
the notorious "scab"), and the lice, ticks and blowfly,
which afflict sheep. But they are also cousins of chemicals which
have been used in chemical warfare against humans too.
Until 1992, dipping (not necessarily with OPs) was compulsory,
as it has been for most of this century. Not that the diseases of
sheep were new. Shepherds have always used anything to hand to try
to keep their animals clean. Sheep historically were herded through
streams (the farmhands nearly as immersed as the sheep), and smeared
with everything from tar to elder leaves. As a last resort, the
maggoty wounds infected by blowfly were scraped out with a penny,
and there was a feeling that the coins' copper might help sterilise
the wound. Lime, lead-oxide, mercury, turpentine and - finally -
arsenic were all used. W H Hudson, writing on shepherding in the
mid and late nineteenth century talks about the problems one shepherd
had in getting paid whilst laid off, probably suffering arsenic
poisoning after dipping in a stream-side tank, when he inadvertently
swallowed some of the mixture. Goodness knows what the effect must
have been on the shepherd's dogs, which within living memory were
often ritually chucked into the mixture at the end of the session,
and whose life-span must have allowed a considerable build-up of
poison.
In 1800, Lord Somerville in Norfolk had introduced systemic dunking
of his flock in an arsenic solution. By the turn of the last century,
compulsory dipping had come in, and shepherds were watched by the
village policeman to ensure that each sheep endured a proper baptism
by chemical. So successful was this policy that by the 1950's sheep
scab was banished from the nation's flock. But it returned twenty
years later, and compulsory dipping was reintroduced. For the next
twenty years, sheep were rounded up and made to jump into a tank,
usually in an organochlorine dip. These chemicals were effective,
but also, notoriously, very persistent in the environment. It seemed
sensible - less risky - to switch to organophsophates, which bio-degrade
readily.
For the last ten years or so, there have been growing fears that
this latest chemical has its own problems. Official report after
official report defends their use, provided proper care is taken,
but the reassurance does little to dent concern.
Always the villains in the pesticide story, farmers now surprise
themselves by fearing that they are victims. But are they at last
falling prey to the dangers of the chemical world so many of them
have defended for years - or to the suburban nervousness of so many
of their new neighbours?
There are something like 80,000 sheep flocks in the UK. Now that
farmers are simply required to maintain disease control by hook
or by crook, some now dip against blowfly, but others only dip against
scab, and a few not at all. Scab is a horrible disease, driving
sheep to distraction by its persistent itchiness. After years in
which it was virtually non-existent in British flocks, it has made
a comeback. This need not continue: there are replacements for OPs.
But that is not by any means the end of the story.
For many of the proponents of continued use, banning OPs on present
evidence would be a dangerous concession, not to justifiable caution,
but to irrationality. In 1993, years into the controversy, John
Thorley, secretary-general of the National Sheep Association, called
for information from his 9,000 members (about a quarter of the total
using dips). "Out of that number, 75 responded and out of those
30 indicated a problem." He sympathises with the sufferers,
but cannot see that OPs have been demonstrated to merit a ban.
One survey in the mid 90's by the National Farmers Union (NFU)
suggested that a third of dippers who use OPs suffer some effects.
Probably most of these experience the same sort of discomfort as
someone using gloss paints (the industry suggests that this may
be because both paints and sheepdips contain solvents). A majority
of shepherds and sheep-dip contractors do not claim any ill-effects,
often after years of intensive - and often careless - use. Bob Blanden,
a sheep dip contractor, who believed in being very careful, and
has felt no ill-effects, said: "I've had massive exposure,
and I'm not alone. I can get pretty depressed at times, but I don't
think it's OPs. We use dips sensibly. If you wear the correct clothing
then I personally feel they're OK".
But there have been persistent and serious accounts of suffering.
Some sheep farmers believe they experience effects such as anxiety
and fatigue, and in some cases, paralysis. They join an army of
modern people who suffer "non-specific" symptoms, taking
many forms and plausibly caused disparately. In the view of some
campaigners against OPs, many people who have never dipped sheep
in their lives are in contact with OPs from other routes (the flea-collar
on their cat, for instance). With or without OPs, people are suffering
ME-type effects, some very profound, of the kind which have been
claimed for some Gulf War veterans, and some water consumers who
in 1988 received aluminium sulphate from an accident at Camelford,
in Cornwall. These last displayed much the raft of symptoms claimed
for OP-exposure, but claimed to be victims of a wholly different
chemical (aluminium-sulphate).
The most important non-official player in the Camelford saga was
Elizabeth Sigmund, whose self-styled South West Environmental Protection
Agency was very successful in casting doubt on the several official
reports which proposed that the very real illnesses people suffered
after South West Water polluted their water were more likely to
be caused by anxiety whipped up by an irresponsible press than by
the chemicals in their taps.
Even those (and I am one of them, see my book, Life on a modern
planet) who think Mrs Sigmund was wrong about Camelford are free
to think she may have got the right end of the stick about OPs.
Certainly she has been the first port of call for many sufferers
who feel they have few other sources of redress. Elizabeth Sigmund
said hundreds of sufferers have directly got in touch. But she went
on: "I'm told by nearly everyone who gets in touch that they
know others who are affected but don't want to get involved.
"I think this situation is different to Camelford because
we have got good clinicians looking at these people and quite a
reasonable number have specialist clinicians who say that they are
suffering peripheral neuropathy. The problem is that proving a causal
link is almost impossible because it is illegal to test such dangerous
chemicals on human beings.
"But we have got evidence of a connection between their exposure
to OPs and their having the symptoms. That's good circumstantial
evidence. The exposure is closely followed by the symptoms."
Mrs Sigmund argued that OPs should not be used until they are cleared
of some of these charges.
Some - a very few - link heart problems to OP exposure and can
cite medical literature and their own doctors to support their case.
The best known of these is Gary Coomber, a Kent farmer whose case
was been taken up by Alan Care of solicitors Leigh Day, one of the
most successful of the new wave of law firms pursuing personal damage
claims.
And yet the nag remains: if there are tens of thousands of users,
why are only a few hundred people suffering sufficiently to do something
about it? The people reporting major effects may demonstrate that
OPs are dangerous to only a few people, perhaps because of their
genetic make-up. But many of these people may merely demonstrate
that some farmers are prone to what a reactionary sort of mind is
inclined to think is Syndrome Hysteria. Indeed, is it a matter of
either-or? Maybe some people are victims of small effects which
they are psychologically - and innocently - inclined to magnify
into much more serious symptoms.
So tricky an area of debate needed a proper forum, but after years
of bubbling under, it wasn't until 1995 one was found. In June of
that year the NFU and the British Medical Association held a symposium
in London. It was the first time victims (real or imagined) and
medical experts met properly to thrash out the very different perceptions
of what is going on. The conference heard papers which left most
people feeling that the case against OPs, even at low doses, was
growing in seriousness.
It came by the two classic routes by which we think about environmental
health issues. First, there is epidemiological data. Some credible
people are reporting damage. But such anecdotal evidence is always
fraught with difficulties, for all that it has the moral authenticity
of being an account of personal suffering. More systematically,
a study by the Institute of Occupational Health at Birmingham University,
published that spring, found damage - admittedly very slight - even
amongst sheep-dippers who had not, unprompted, reported effects.
The difficulty is that a similar study might just as easily have
found none: studies of these sorts of subtle effects are notoriously
variable and controversial.
Second, the conference heard toxicological evidence as to how such
damage might be occurring and why it might not have been understood
before. In particular Dr Goran Jamal, a consultant clinical neurophsyiologist
at Glasgow's Southern General Hospital, and a member of the medical
and scientific panel of the Veterinary Products Committee (the Government
independent advisory group), suggested that studies on the nervous
system might have concentrated on pathways which would not have
been good markers for the sort of effects OPs could be expected
to have, and ignored more susceptible pathways.
Dr Jamal stressed another important point: that whilst OPs do not,
in the jargon, "persist and bioaccumulate" in the human
body (ie, they do not hang around and concentrate themselves in
particular parts of our bodies), the damage they may do is of the
kind which is permanent and accumulates with each new dose. In other,
words: you don't get better between each "hit", but rather
the effect of each hit adds up.
Not exactly to the surprise of the campaigners, who have become
cynical of the regulatory process, in July 1995, the Veterinary
Products Committee endorsed the "steady as you go" approach.
The IOH's study was to be seen, the committee said, as valuable
but inconclusive. In particular, the authors of the report were
declared to have gone beyond their own findings in suggesting in
a paper for the Lancet that there was strong evidence of long-term
health effects from OPs. As usual in such things, the committee
endorsed the quest for more data. Using this view, the Ministry
of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food supported continued use of OPs,
and tenders for further epidemiological studies were invited.
Whether all this will end in a ban on organophosphate sheepdips
is unclear. At least one senior and informed health specialist says
privately that he wavers dramatically in his reading of the seriousness
of the problem. It certainly seems right to distrust anyone who
says they know, either way, whether OPs are as villainous as commonly
supposed. What we do know is that there are alternatives, mostly
pyrethroids, which are expensive, more complicated to use, arguably
less effective and may turn out to produce their own "victims".
They certainly require much the same safety precautions as OPs.
It might seem obvious that on the kind of evidence which now surrounds
the OP issue, one might just as well play safe and ban the stuff.
Campaigners stress that this is why we have the "precautionary
principle", which, as interpreted by them, says that "reasonable
doubt" is enough to criminalise suspect chemicals.
In the real world, the precautionary principle is open to many
definitions and, especially in an age when campaigners are pointing
the finger of blame at all sorts of chemicals, often on shaky evidence,
it becomes important to think carefully about how much and what
sort evidence should be required for a ban. Why not advise caution
and advertise the alternatives?
The Government and its advisers have always said it is important
to take precautions when using OPs, which are obviously potentially
very dangerous. But farmers often ignore such warnings. At the June
1995 meeting, several farmers stood up and said that they could
not be expected to read the precautionary messages on chemical containers.
This comes close to saying that farmers are too lazy or stupid to
be in modern animal husbandry. Others said that they could not be
expected to go to the admittedly quite serious inconvenience of
wearing the right protective clothing (whose effectiveness seems
real, but marginal). One wonders if this sort of argument would
wash with firemen, divers or soldiers. A third group of farmers
said they should not be expected to pay extra for safer products:
which all of us have to do all the time, even in industries of marginal
profitability such as sheep farmers claim theirs to be.
In 1995, Bob Blanden, the contractor whose teams use Ops to dip
about 80,000 sheep a year, said, "The protective clothing is
not onerous. I've never understood the objections to it. You're
not having to dress up as though for chemical warfare. Leggings
and boots are fairly important just to keep dry. Wearing gauntlets
isn't difficult".
But the sufferers deserve sympathy, not least because they feel
they have no obvious official champion for their cause. A likely
port of call - the Health and Safety Executive - is regarded probably
unjustly as just as likely to prosecute farmers for breaking the
rules as to sympathise with their illnesses. GPs are notoriously
sceptical about ME-type complaints. So the ill farmers have tended
to go to self-appointed voluntary groups, which, so far from being
sceptical about the new world of chemophobia, are among its main
proponents.
In 1995, Mr Coomber felt he had been badly let down, "by nearly
anybody who's had anything to do with us, really. Who are you going
to see with this problem? You can't see a toxicologist employed
by the National Health Service. Their experts don't see patients.
We've had to go to America and Israel for expertise. We've allowed
chemical companies to license their own products, really, because
the licensing body is run on licence fees, and they monitor their
own products." Mr Coomber, hardly surprisingly, turned to alternative
chemicals.
He felt that the Government and the industry form an unholy alliance.
Yet one could as easily say that the firms which make OPs can claim
to operate within tight regulations. This truer view may lead to
the real point of principle in the issue. It is, finally, Parliament
which produced whatever OP poisoning there is. At every step, democratically
accountable regulators believed they were doing the right thing.
They may, of course, have fallen prey to the problem all regulators
face when they have endorsed a product or procedure: they are reluctant
to admit they may have been wrong. If the industry fears a flood
of damages cases if the regulator concedes misjudgement, there are
lawyers and scientists who believe that the Government equally worries
that such an admission might open it up to accusation and litigation.
It is, unfortunately, unlikely that the small crop of legal cases
now being pursued will lead to argument in open court. Too often
in this sort of issue, the parties settle in closed rooms without
the matter being thrashed out in public. We may never have a judge's
or a jury's plain man's view of the evidence surrounding OPs, nor
use the OPs case to begin to build a social consensus of where scientific
evidence - or anecdotal evidence, for that matter - fits into our
decision-making.
Meantime, the flight from OPs continued. Chris Akrigg, a university-educated
shepherd in Wharfedale, switched from the chemical years ago: "We
went to a pyrethrum, which is apparently safer for us. We had always
used OPs and I personally have had no ill-effects. But there's just
so much argument and if there's any danger at all and you know there
are alternatives, the cost doesn't really enter into it for me".
That sounds rational enough for all working purposes.
(4) Pesticides (and gender-bending chemicals) (Top)
The difficulty in many other cases of industrial contamination and
risk, real and otherwise, is that we all receive huge amounts of
scarifying information, and that it has taken many years for any
seriously competing view to break through.
One man in particular is a hero of this cause. Professor Bruce
Ames (interviewed by me in 1996) has so many important things to
say, it is a blessing that almost all of them are very cheering.
In particular, he believes that man-made chemicals are at most a
trivial cause of cancer. "They're simply a red-herring",
he said. "The average American family pays about seven thousand
dollars a year because of various regulations, and half of that
comes because of the Environmental Protection Agency. We are regulating
residues of synthetic chemicals when they occur at levels tens of
thousands of times less than naturally-occurring chemicals which
are in every cup of coffee." He is as robust on the latest
environmental scare. Men and women may be receiving man-made "gender-bending"
estrogenic chemicals, but they really don't seem to matter.
Lean and whiskery, the Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular
Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, is a striking
figure: "I'm half a biochemist and half a geneticist",
he said. His work is amongst the most cited in the literature, he
is a member of the American National Academy of Sciences.
If environmentalists have one preoccupation in common it is a generalised
dislike of industrial capitalism and a generalised affection for
regulation. Ames said, "There is politics in all of this, I
think. People on the left tend not to like industry; they think
of themselves as working from altruism whilst industry works from
greed. And the right tend to feel that bureaucrats are working in
their own self-interest", said Dr Ames. He is one a handful
of scientists who weigh in on environmental matters, from global
warming to gender-bending, often publishing through the Competitive
Enterprise Institute. His writing appears, for instance, in the
CEI's book The True State of the Planet [2], a title designed to
pun on the far more familiar annual, The State of the Planet, from
the green Worldwatch Institute.
If one had time for only one of his insights then it would have
to be this one: Eat your vegetables. He suggests there is an evolutionary
explanation why every mother has always known the power of this
rubric: "The tribes whose mums that didn't tell their kids
to eat up their veggies died out". Oddly, and more certainly,
it is now known that plants make their own pesticides, and that
there are far more of these in our diet than the man-made kind.
This picture of a naturalness tainted with its own risks was reinforced
by Dr Roger Fenwick, of the Institute of Food Research (one of the
semi-official science institutes administered by the Agricultural
and Food Research Council. A few years ago, in an article for the
inhouse science magazine of the Bayer corporation, he wrote that
there are approximately 1000 chemical additives registered for food
use, and around 300 chemicals registered for use in cultivation
and preservation. The effects of these are mostly well-researched
and well-known. This specialist in the implications for human health
of naturally biologically-active compounds in food continued,
"In comparison there are perhaps half a million natural chemicals
present in food plants, this number increasing as a result of processing,
whether domestic or industrial.
The majority of these natural chemicals are unidentified but they
undoubtedly make a significant contribution to the flavour, texture,
appearance and nutritional value of the resulting food. In marked
contrast to the man-made chemicals in our diet, only a small proportion
of these compounds have had their biological properties examined.
Yet contrary to public opinion, these natural compounds can have
nutritional significance and, not infrequently, may be harmful."
Dr Fenwick went on to list some of the fatal or dangerous toxic
effects of some of the most "natural" and even hyped plants
such as cassava, yams, legumes and perhaps especially comfrey ("a
highly toxic plant causing liver damage and death").
The point here is not that we should become wholly relaxed about
anything man-made nor neurotically anxious about anything natural.
"...what I am suggesting is that this concern extend equally
to all chemicals, irrespective of origin. After all, if our bodies
do not differentiate between artificially and naturally produced
chemicals, why should we?"
Curiously enough, several decades of anxious investigation of the
effects of food-stuffs and diets have strained and strained, and
produced little more than a mouse. Richard Girling, writing in the
Sunday Times Magazine (20.12.1998), reported on a vast array of
research, especially concerning the supposed dangers of eating meat
and of being over-weight, and talked to many leading figures in
the debate, with the overall conclusion that cancer and heart disease
could not be neatly correlated with any particular habit.
Girling notices but does not really clear up a serious difficulty
in such matters. He alerts us to the way the government occasionally
indulges in nannyism, but stresses that at least the state is not
abandoning us:
"You could not count the number of committees and sub-committees,
steering groups and task forces that have been assigned to keep
death off our plates. It is an acronym-collectors' dream world.
Worrying away at salmonella and E-coli, for instance, is the Advisory
Committee on the Microbiological Safety of Food (ACMSF). The Department
of Health (DH) has separate committees on the Toxicity, Mutagenicity
and Carcinogenicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and
the Environment (Cot, Com, and Coc respectively), which monitor
foods at the level of their chemical components. In this they are
aided by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF),
which has a steering group on Chemical Aspects of Food Surveillance
(SGCAFS), which in turn has a Working Party on Naturally Occurring
Toxicants in Food (WPNOTF). There are many more. They all publish
annual reports, most of which pass quietly into the science libraries
without ever attracting the smallest amount of interest.
In many ways, this is just as well. If we were kept abreast of
the full range of everything which attracted the committees' attention,
we might stitch our lips together permanently, rather than take
the risk of actually letting anything past them."
This is the real difficulty. We need to develop institutions which
enable scientific evidence to be gathered and assessed, but to insulate
them as much as possible from the requirement, and even their own
desire, to produce simplistic advice.
Girling quotes work by the Institute of Public Health at Cambridge
University which suggested that meat-eating was not a very good
indicator of good or bad health, but that the consumption of rather
more than ordinary amounts of vegetables was quite well associated
with good health.
This accords well with Bruce Ames's understanding of the role of
vegetables: "The quarter of the US population that eats least
of them has a doubled risk of most cancers and heart attacks compared
with the quarter eating the most," says Dr Ames.
Indeed, even a heavy smoker who eats vegetables and fruit halves
his or her risk of lung cancer (it will remain a large risk). Of
course, and by the way, it is not clear that it is socially responsible
to give up smoking: Dr Ames suggests that one should "smoke
for Britain" in the sense that a shortened life was cheaper
for the welfare and health services. It was a joke, but its larkiness
is of a piece with his understanding that ecological life is full
of ironies and paradoxes. Amongst them is the idea that many environmentalists
want pesticides banned or made expensive: this would make it even
less likely that poor people would eat more of the foodstuffs they
most need. Something of the same argument applies to organic farming,
quite aside from its likely very small addition to the riskiness
of the vegetable diet.
Ames was amused to note that a student of his had been working
for the firm making Hershey bars: she had argued that folic acid
(a micronutrient Dr Ames especially admires) could very easily be
added to the chocolate of the bars and would confer benefit. "The
federal Food and Drugs Administration said Hershey would do it over
its dead body. Apparently Hershey bars are a bad thing and it would
be wrong to add something good to them!" Of course, for their
part libertarians might object to the scheme on the grounds that
it amounts to social engineering.
It is the Gradgrind skills of number-crunchers which reveal to
us the growth in well-being so many of us find hard to believe.
As men and women (in spite, apparently, of their being fattier and
plumper than men) nearly everywhere in the world live for longer
and longer, it is becoming more and more clear that rates for almost
every sort of cancer (except in the lung) are steady or falling.
"The idea that there is a cancer epidemic is just a lie",
said Dr Ames.
Breast cancer is not rising. Stomach cancer is falling: "We're
doing something right there, but we don't know what," said
Dr Ames about the latter scourge. It is true, however, that more
people now die of cancer than ever before: but that is because they
now live long enough for that to become the case. "We need
the Third World to get rich enough to live long enough to die of
cancer, like us", said the wry scientist.
This is the sort of data he gains from epidemiolgists. He keeps
in touch with two of the most celebrated: Sir Richard Doll and Richard
Peto at Oxford University, who demonstrated the seriousness of smoking
years ago, and have since demonstrated that man-made pollution simply
cannot compete with tobacco and a lousy diet - and genetic bad luck
- when it comes to early death. Sir Richard has always argued that
up to two percent of fatal cancers may be caused by pollution, but
not more.
Dr Ames is more bullish still. "I think the figure is nearer
one percent", he insisted. "But that's mostly dirty air,
for instance: I think chemical pollution is really even more trivial."
The contribution for which Professor Ames will go down in history
was his explanation of why it is likely that man-made chemicals
are having at best a minute effect. Thirty years ago, he researched
various food additives to see if they might be carcinogenic. In
the process, he invented what came to be called the Ames test. Using
chopped rat's liver as a medium, he tested whether chemicals damaged
DNA cells: their being mutagenic was for years thought likely to
be a nearly perfect proxy for their being carcinogenic. With qualifications,
the test remains extremely useful and has saved the lives of thousands
and probably millions of laboratory animals because, as Dr Ames
said, "A little rat's liver goes a long way".
Over the years, Dr Ames became sceptical of the usefulness of much
live-animal cancer testing. Put simply: the high doses involved
cause cancer rather than reveals it. But the really shattering revelations
came when he realised that half the chemicals tested on live animals
were showing as carcinogenic, and that was true whether they were
natural or synthetic. The tests, if accurate, would make us very
worried about natural and wholly unavoidable chemicals. In the degree
to which they are less than accurate, they do less to reinforce
the view that we should be worrying about man-made chemicals.
All this would be frustratingly incomplete without some better
explanation of why people do get cancer. Dr Ames believes we get
the disease because we live long enough for a natural (and mutagenic)
process of oxidation finally to do us in. "The existence of
masses of long-lived humans is a modern phenomenon", he said.
We live longer not because we have cured cancer, obviously: rather,
we live longer and become prey to it. It happens that many animal
biological processes oxidise cells: in rats the process happens
eight times quicker than in humans, so they live short lives. In
humans, the process is slower, but inevitable in the end. Evolution
mostly engineers for creatures to live long enough to reproduce,
but has produced in humans the kind of intelligence which has enabled
us to control our environment well enough to live for long enough
to accumulate the cancer-causing side effects of our metabolic activity.
We are also, to return to Girling's theme, eating what Dr Ames
calls, "Way too much fat". Again, evolution has programmed
us to gorge on this vital and historically rare commodity.
However - to come full circle - vegetables and fruit are great
anti-oxidants and can help delay death. They also give us many other
cancer-delaying micronutrients. There's no need for faddy eating
by the way: "Just five portions a day of fruit or vegetables,
that'll do it", said the good doctor.
The message comes too late, in a way. Cancer scares are harder
to launch now than they used to be, and the campaigners have moved
on to new territory. The same principles guide them: they need a
man-made cause of a frightening problem which is thought to be on
the increase, but a cause whose mechanics, whilst widely advertised
by serious people, are not yet so well understood that their seriousness
(or lack of it) is clear. Above all, they need a problem whose alleviation
is uncertain and which may, just may, turn out to be difficult and
expensive.
Enter, the gender-benders. These are the endocrine-disrupters,
and in particular the oestrogens and oestrogen-imitators which can
effect (for good and ill) the reproductive and immune systems of
animals, including man. They are supposed, rather uncertainly, to
be having a deleterious effect on mankind.
The uncertainty begins with the problem of whether there is a problem.
Various researchers have, over the years, suggested that male humans
especially in the Western world have suffered a decline in sperm.
Citing this evidence, the Medical Research Council's "Environmental
Oestrogens: Consequences to Human Health and Wildlife" [3],
ended its section on the matter by noting reports that suggested
there was no such effect and concluded:
"In summary, although a number of studies have drawn attention
to the possibility of decreasing sperm counts over the last few
decades, the evidence is not entirely convincing. Furthermore, reanalysis
of the date of Carlsen et al (1992) but covering only the last two
decades (1970-1990) indicated that sperm counts were not decreasing
(Brake and Krause, 1992). In addition, a comprehensive study in
the USA, where potential variables were minimised, showed no evidence
for decreasing sperm counts or distribution over the period 1951-1977
(MacLeod and Wang, 1979). However, the most recent study of Parisian
sperm donors (Auger et al , 1995) did demonstrate a decrease in
the quantity and quality of sperm during a 20 year period (19373-1992)
in the study population. Toppari et al (1995) concluded that the
available evidence points to a rise, in Europe and many other countries,
in male reproductive disorders involving sperm counts and probably
sperm quality. Clearly, much more study and analysis is required
to establish with certainty the position regarding time-related
trends in sperm quantity and quality and their possible impacts
on male fertility, particularly in the general population."
The same picture of uncertainty applies to several other problems
which have been prayed in aid of the idea that our species faces
an endocrine system crisis. Even though it is clear that there has
been a rise in testicular and breast cancer, it is much less clear
why that might be. Indeed, the Ames-hypothesis that a rich diet
may lie behind various problems is borne out by evidence that testicular
cancer rates were lower than normal for the cohort of men born during
the Second World War, and that Oriental men are less threatened
by the disease than their Western counterparts.
Richard Girling points to a fascinating line of research in Australia
which spotted that sheep there were becoming androgynous in various
ways, the result, it is believed, of farmers letting the animals
get at too much clover, a natural producer of plant oestrogens (phytoestrogens).
There are, Girling notes, other plants which could produce the
same feminising effect, notable amongst them soy, which is used
in oriental products and in plenty of processed Western ones too.
But it may be that so far from worrying about the supposed androgenysing
effects of soy, we should be celebrating its potential for reproducing
in the West the eastern advantages of relatively low risk of hormone-related
cancers such as breast, prostate and endometrium.
The green campaigners naturally seized on the oestrogen issue,
and especially so since the evidence that industrial activity lay
behind the problems seems so compelling. In 1996, the campaigners
had to hand what seemed to them a book which would do for the gender-benders
what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had done for the pesticides and
wildlife issue thirty years before. The comparison was drawn in
a foreword by Vice President Al Gore, an environmental commentator
who could be relied on to get the wrong end of most sticks (as was
evidenced in his book on the environment). Dr Theo Colborn, Dr John
Peterson Myers and Dianne Dumanoski published Our Stolen Future,
first in the USA and then in the UK5.
It is not a particularly extreme book, and not the worst of a genre
of scare-mongering tomes which are generally extremely and even
dangerously poor. It is bad enough, though. Professor Lewis Smith,
director of the Medical Research Council's Institute for Environment
and Health at Leicester University was quoted in the Daily Telegraph
(2.5.1996) as accusing the book of making as "pure assertion"
links between pollution and human health. Along the way, he suggested
that our new laziness and lack of exercise may be as much a cause
of any decline in sperm quality as a chemical, whether natural or
unnatural. He went on: "We've given ourselves over to suspicion
and prejudice. We must get back to running society on evidence-based
assessments. Otherwise we are going to make very costly decisions.
If we do not make decisions based on the evidence, it is back to
the Dark Ages".
The peculiar thing about this book is that it is a rather interesting
summation of some scientific insights which its authors think support
their general purpose. Along the way, they retail the story of the
Australian sheep, and they remark on the feminising influence of
marijuana-smoking. They do so to show how gender-benders work, but
they return quickly to their main theme: the effect of man-made
chemicals. They never suggest how ambiguous is the evidence of feminisation
in nature and man, nor to the huge regulatory success, especially
in the past twenty years, in reducing people's exposure to most
of the organochlorine chemicals they are so busy condemning. Above
all they ignore the huge effort, easily tracked by anyone with access
to a public library or the Internet, made by governments all over
the world, and within their supra-national organisations (notably
the OECD), to track down and develop evidence about all these supposed
problems and their solution.
On gender-benders, Dr Ames said: "I think the campaigners
are making exactly the same sort of mistakes they made with cancer.
They always ignore the natural background level of the chemicals
they're interested in." He has severe strictures for Our Stolen
Future, "The book lacks understanding of toxicology: whether
the amounts consumed have adequate potency to account for the effect
of concern." In fact, he said, synthetic oestrogens are "miniscule"
in effect compared with the background level of hormones in the
body, and the plant hormones in our normal diet. He believes the
weak oestrogens in fruit and vegetables may well actually protect
women from breast cancer.
Paradoxically, Our Stolen Future made the point that Rachel Carson
dwelled too heavily on carcinogenic effects in her controversial
account of modern chemicals and thus she missed the opportunity
for a prescient exploration of their supposed gender-bending effects.
The authors might have noticed that the world has moved on in other
ways. Our Stolen Future produced an ambivalent set of headlines
for its publishers: thirty years on, the public is at least now
alerted that all these matters are the subject of debate rather
than mere outrage. The book did have its moment in the sun, but
there was plenty of comment about the poverty of its arguments.
These were not criticisms of good science, nor Panglossian attempts
to swallow every industry message. They were criticisms about scares
or accounts of scares which do not trouble themselves with the complexity
- the fascinating complexity - of the real world.
Footnotes
[1] Antibiotic Resistance: the threat to international health, 1997,
The Wellcome Trust, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE.
[2] The Free Press, Simon and Schuster
[3] Institute for Environmental Health, University of Leicester,
PO Box 138, Lancaster Road, Leicester, LE1 9HN
[4] Our Stolen Future: How man-made chemicals are threatening our
fertility, intelligence, and survival, by Theo Colborn, John Peterson
Myers, and Dianne Dumanoski. Little, Brown, 1996
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