Information is tailored to suit their audience

Will they have time, energy or ability to do this? Do they listen to those with experience of chemical damage or those who say it can’t happen? There is no evidence, or we are the evidence? The following information from a chemical victim and battler of 20 years may help.

The dangers of organo phosphates (derivatives of wartime nerve gas) were known from the 50s (The Zuckerman Report), aired again by ‘Silent Spring’ in the 60s, clarified precisely in the MS 17 document from the HSE/DH in the 80s (which never left the shelf), but they were made a statutory requirement for farmers, for sheep-dipping and warble fly treatment, with no proper warnings.

Prosecution followed non-use. As farmers died or committed suicide the official statement was ‘there is no evidence’, and if not, it was the farmers’ own fault for not following (often unfollowable, in practical terms) instructions. There was neither recognition nor redress. It took some 50 years for the official verdict of ‘unlawful killing’ of Ronald Madison by an OP, Sarin, at Porton Down to be achieved.

When Ops were gradually removed from these areas they remained the officially recommended treatment for children’s head lice, then as part of the recommended package of foreign holiday chemicals. Their current use in aircraft fuels, invading both cockpit and cabin, is under current investigation, since pilots have been too ‘stoned’ to land safely in recent years. Officially, of course, there is still ‘no evidence’.

The dangers of the persistent, Red List, organochlorines (Ocs) were known from the same periods, but their use in timber treatment was often an enforced requirement for mortgages. As the numbers of victims grew, but remained unrecognised, unadmitted, without redress, even when illness could be explained in no other terms and symptoms fitted those listed on data sheets (about which few people knew), there was still ‘no evidence’, therefore no-one could be ill, etc. Since Ocs are persistent in body fat, the food chain and the environment, are air and water borne, they are still a time bomb. DDT, banned for years, is now killing penguins in the Antarctic, Inuit mothers’ breast milk should be illegal, in the arctic.

Treated timbers in homes may be dangerous 50 years later (PCP in Melton Constable Hall) and when not in your home treated timbers were actually toxic waste, to be disposed of in properly licensed tips. So lindane and pentachlorophenol gradually, for no admitted reasons, were phased out for this. Guess what lindane was still an approved treatment for children’s head lice. There was no evidence.

Tributyl Tin was developed as a boat antifoulant, but after killing and deforming estuary life it was transferred to domestic timber treatment.

Said by MAFF to be one of the most toxic substances they had ever had to handle, and by a government lab in Plymouth to be so dangerous that it had no known safe level, it was withdrawn from domestic timber treatment and all DIY uses in 1990, with a public leaflet from HSE/DH saying that ‘the committee (The Advisory Committee on Pesticides, the ACP), found no evidence of risk to human health’.

The same bodies at the same time told Croners, who do the chemical safety guides for those who ‘need to know’ that it is extremely irritant to skin and lungs, is extremely poisonous to the nervous system and the mortality rate from organo tins is extremely high. In 1993 I asked HSE and the ACP, at a meeting with MP, Sir David Mitchell, and my recorder going on the table, to explain the discrepancy in this information.

Dr Foster of HSE said “We tailor our information to our audience’. Believe them, they do.

In my own case ‘there was no evidence’ officially. All mention of TBT was removed from the official record of my case. Correction was refused and no apology was thought necessary. I was exposed to other and safer chemicals.

So what next for TBT? When the new Boocide Regulations arrived, and there was no need to list chemicals (even when banned or restricted pesticides) on labels or packaging of chemically impregnated manufactured domestic goods, and with no customer or retailer right to see the data sheets, it reappeared, this time in our duvets, underwear, shoe so.es and (at 47 times the save level and with Permethrin) in our carpets. It was in children’s nappies. If listed at all it was as ‘ultrafresh’ to protect us against allergies and dust mites!

On chemicals, government and industry are as one. Chemical company advisers and consultants in parliament in my case included Sir Patrick McNair Wilson for Phone Poulenc (Lindane and PCP) and Dr Jack Cunningham (later Min for Agriculture, the heaviest chemical users) for Albright and Wilson (Tributyl Tin).

When victims of the first Gulf War tried to claim for recognition and help for Gulf War Syndrome (from untested NAPS tablets, CPs, permethrin, etc) the Ministry of Defence, Sir Nicholas Soams, assured them that the NAPS tablets could not have harmed them. He omitted to mention that at the time of the Gulf War he was a director of Hoffmann La Roche, who made them.

So when you have to decide about fluoridation, on the basis of the SHA and PCT leaflets as recently distributed in Southampton (with tear-offs to say if you are in favour, but not that you are not!) perhaps you should know that the chosen references include studies that are outdated, one-offs, are from government propaganda and dental departments rather than health, include two scientists of discredited repute, and in two cases, studies that were never published. The government’s chosen justification, the York Review and the Medical Research Council Report have had to be misquoted in order to use. This is official science.

Those of us who want the Precautionary Principle to be observed are, on the other hand, required to produce properly validated, peer-reviewed studies supported by others. Fluoride comes from apartite. Or do I mean apartheid?

So never forget. They tailor their information to their audience. They themselves have said so.

Margaret Reichlin, MacCallum Road, Upper Enham.