1 FOREWORD
This piece is all about those tools and who sharpens them, or not, as the case may be..
2 Unfinished Business
In a recent Dangerous Globe piece from 29 July this year called “5 Bedtime Stories”, one of them was about Aspartame, and in it I wrote about a scientist, Dr Ralph Walton, and some claims he made on-camera. He stated that the ‘full story was available in his new book’, so I bought it on Kindle for the grand price of $3.10 and now I have the same information that he does. This is the bare bones of it.
The doctor backed up his claims with a series of tables which I’m going to summarise here rather than copy them from him and broach his copyright.
The first table looks at studies specifically conducted to demonstrate the safety of aspartame, upon which the FDA based its approval for use. The table is in two halves and each study is summarised in it, this is an overview…
I am sure we have all heard that ‘correlation is no evidence of causation’, but I also feel strongly that correlation, while not being proof, is still a very good indicator of causation. Therefore, correlation like that shown in the above table indicates the need for a much deeper dive into the material, and for some reason “Industry” seems reluctant to take that plunge.
Worth mentioning here is that when a scientific paper is to be published, the author(s) must declare that the application they make is the ONLY application for publication to that journal or any other journal. The whole idea is that the research in question is the original and unique paper, not just a cut and paste job scattered across the journal sphere.
Dr Walton was also supplied a ‘Bibliography’ by NutraSweet, (brand owners for the aspartame-based sweetener product) which contained an impressive 266 study papers and articles in another table. Impressive until you start to look more deeply into them.
In this bibliography, Dr. Walton, noted 33 groups of studies, in which each group contains several papers that are based on one single set of study data. In some, the title may have been rearranged, or the list of authors shuffled into a different order, but essentially each of these groups is based on a single core dataset that is supposed to be one “Unique” study.
The winner of this league table goes to entry number 3 of the 33 groups, which is a group of 5 studies published between 1991 and 1995 all based on the same basic dataset, with the researchers names and titles of the documents jumbled up.
One study has now become five studies, and Abracadabra! Notice how my hands never left my wrist:
In this way, 33 “original” papers from the bibliography have been magically magnified into 75 papers, basically exposing 42 cases of somewhat dodgy scientific reporting.
I find myself asking why was it necessary to go to such contorted, and apparently fraudulent, lengths to convince us that aspartame is totally safe if aspartame really was totally safe?
It would be easy to think that this controversy over aspartame was a simple ‘one-off’ occurrence, but nothing could be further from the truth. The same sort of “Industry Funded Studies Prove Everything is Fine” profile is found with research on 5G, tobacco smoking, asbestos, a wide range of pharmaceuticals, lead in petrol, climate change, GMO foods, Round Up, Nitrogen, Co2, PFOS, PCB’s, BGH, GMO’s and very many more.
This “Industry Funded”, phenomena comes under the heading of Predictable Results, or Foregone Conclusions, and they are the very opposite of science.
If we reach the point of picking up a new research paper and, just by scanning the names of the authors reach a conclusion, then scientific debate has become meaningless. Worse still it has become meaningless at a time in the history of the planet when scientific debate and enquiry have never been more important.
Think “4th Industrial Revolution”
3 Why must we have all these studies anyway?
It’s a very good question, but the experts at the CDC, EPA, FCC, and EPA have already accepted thousands of products like 5G, fertilisers, weedkillers, drugs and vaccines and that should be the end of it surely?
Unfortunately, it isn’t, its just the beginning because in 1960 periodic health surveys began in the US, and large numbers of American children were found to be limited in their activities by chronic conditions like asthma, hearing and sight impairment, allergies, and mental issues, and as time has passed the numbers have increased dramatically.
In 1960 it was 1.8%, (about a million children), and the rate continued a steady climb. By 1981, it was 3.8% and in the 1988 survey it became 4.1%.In 1994, it was up to 6.5% and by 2010 it had grown to a staggering 8% or approximately 5,500,000 children!!!
I call it staggering because it represents a 400% increase in chronic health conditions over 50 years, the sort of massive change in health profiles for young people that does not occur naturally.
This is all about America so far, but we in UK and Europe haven’t dodged these bullets either. It also follows that patterns of illness and treatment follow each other on the trade winds of the Atlantic, just like the rules and regulations of the CDC and FDA.
2017 figures show One in 11 children in the UK suffer from asthma, and in 2015, one in 530 suffer from Type 1 diabetes and in 2014, one in 14 children has an allergy to one or more foods. Israel found that one in 12 students had asthma and by 2014, one in 7 children had ADHD.
These numbers only really mean something when you remember the fact that they are real people we are speaking of. Let us look at it in the context of what life is like for the 5.5 million American children, (and millions of others worldwide in the richest, most advanced countries of the world).
According to the US corporation, Medco, managers of medication distribution for 65 million Americans, ‘one in four children under the age of 19 take regular medicine for a chronic condition, and one in fourteen took two or more medications’, often for asthma, ADHD, depression, and other psychiatric conditions.
A 2010 study found that the rate of Hospitalization of children 0– 4 years old suffering from “complex chronic conditions” rose 24% between 1993 and 2005, and the rate of children hospitalized with two or more concurrent complex conditions increased by 100% during that same period.
Another 2006 study found that 25% of hospital days and 40% of hospital costs were taken up by children (up to 18yo) with CCC’s (chronic complex conditions), and, far more tragically than the cost, we are told that amost half of all hospital child deaths were accounted for in these statistics.
All these numbers are a lot to take in, many people are just overwhelmed by the information, and shy away from getting involved. But This is why all the studies are needed, and even more so today. Most of the studies and references quoted above are over 10 years old, and we can see nothing happening in the last 10 years that will have improved the situation, and plenty that has happened to make it worse.
These non-stop studies are driven by doctors who are desperately trying to find out what is the underlying cause of all this misery. It doesn’t stop at disrupted young lives, hospitalisation, and lifelong drug dependence either. Each of those 5.5 million children has a set of parents, brothers, and sisters who far too often must make that long silent journey from the hospital back to their homes, leaving a much loved, but now lifeless young child behind in the mortuary. Children should bury their parents, it should NOT be the other way round.
This tragic waste of young human life needs explaining, and the FDA and CDC should be leading in the effort to find out and fix it. How are they doing? Well they command budgets in the $Billions bracket every year, they must be doing well surely?
4 All Bent out of Shape.
In a book I often quote from called “Trust us we’re Experts”, by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, the authors make several observations taken from this 395-page document of a US House of Representatives Hearing in 2007. This is archived in PDF form Here, and on our own site Here.
Here are a four examples from the scientific Hall of Mirrors for you to consider:
1 One of the most ‘prestigious scientific journals in America’, the NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine) published a 1986 study on the antibiotic, amoxicillin.
Two studies had been written on this drug, one critical, the other complimentary. The NEJM published the complementary version and rejected the critical one.
The authors of the published study had received $1.6 million in grants ($2.7 Million in todays money) from the drug manufacturer while the author of the critical study had refused corporate funding.
The simple act of the NEJM publication lifted the status of that paper to “The Authorised Version”, giving it the official seal of scientific approval.
By default, the other paper became rubbish overnight. Bad enough for the author of it to have their paper fail publication, but for good measure they also suffered recriminations at their University place of work, loss of income and 5 years of damage to their reputation and standing in the community.
Was it rubbish though?
5 years later, JAMA, {The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association} published that critical paper, following publication of a large-scale test that had been conducted which showed that those children who did not take the amoxycillin demonstrated higher recovery rates than those who did.
Naturally the authors of the first study gave back their $1.6 million in grants and the dastardly author who spent 5 years flipping hamburgers to make a living was given the Nobel prize for medical advancement. And then I woke up.
2 In 1989, the NEJM published an article minimising the danger of asbestos. They must have forgotten to note the author had major connections to the asbestos industry.
3 In 1996, The same journal ran an editorial touting the benefits of diet drugs, and again the amnesia kicked in when the publishers missed the opportunity to note that the editorial’s authors were paid consultants for the companies that sold……diet drugs.
4 In 1997, another ‘conflict of interest’ arose when the NEJM published a scathing review of the book: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment” by Sandra Steingraber.
A highly critical article was written by Jerry H. Berke who, not so scientifically characterised Sandra Steingraber as “obsessed . . . with environmental pollution as the cause of cancer”. He then accused her of “oversights and simplifications . . . biased work . . . notoriously poor scholarship. Apparently “the focus on environmental pollution and agricultural chemicals to explain human cancer has simply not been fruitful nor given rise to useful preventive strategies. . . Living Downstream frightens, at times misinforms, and then scorns genuine efforts at cancer prevention through lifestyle change. The objective of Living Downstream appears ultimately to be controversy.”
What the NEJM must have forgotten (again) to disclose was that Jerry H. Berke, MD, MPH was director of toxicology for W. R. Grace, one of the world’s largest chemical manufacturers and a notorious polluter. A leading manufacturer of asbestos-containing products, W. R. Grace, had been a defendant in several thousand asbestos-related cancer lawsuits and paid $millions in related court judgments. In one such case, the company paid an $8 million out-of-court settlement to the families of seven children and one adult who contracted leukaemia after drinking contaminated water. It appears that W R Grace had polluted the drinking water in the town of Woburn, Massachusetts. During the subsequent investigation, Grace were also caught in two felony lies to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
5 Are conflicts of interest that interesting?
In 1996, Sheldon Krimsky of Tufts University made a study of scientific journal disclosures of interest. The focus was on industry connections of the authors of 789 scientific papers published by 1,105 researchers in 14 leading life science and biomedical journals.
- In 34 percent of the papers, at least one of the chief authors had an identifiable financial interest connected to the research. (The estimate of 34 percent was probably below the true level of financial conflict because under the terms of his research project Krimsky was unable to check if researchers owned stock/received consulting fees Etc.)
- None of these financial interests were disclosed in the journals, where readers could see them.
- In 1999, a larger study by Krimsky examined 62,000 articles published in 210 different scientific journals, all of which had a formal requirement for disclosure of conflicts of interest. He found only 0.5% of the articles contained any disclosures at all. That is 310 articles out of 62,000.
- 142 of the journals had not published a single disclosure during the year under study (1997).
In 1986, associate professor at Florida university, Richard Davidson, realised that he had gradually been forming the opinion that every time he read a study conducted by a drug company, the drug under review was always superior to all of its competitors in terms of efficacy and safety. He decided to test his opinion and set to, reviewing 107 new drug publications.
The results confirmed what he had suspected. Studies of new drugs sponsored by drug companies were more likely to favour those drugs than studies not sponsored by drug companies. In all 107 publications, every single paper supported the claims of the funding party. Not a word of discord
In 1994 Boston researchers scrutinised the relationship between the reported drug performance in published trials of anti-inflammatory drugs (used in the treatment of arthritis) and the persons who funded those trials. They reviewed 56 studies and in every case the manufacturer associated drug was equal or superior in efficacy and toxicity to the comparison drug despite the simple fact that the trial data did not support the claims of superiority especially in regard to side effects.
In 1996 to researchers compared studies of new drug therapies and found that 98% of the studies funded by a drugs maker reached drug-favourable conclusions.
In 1998 the prestigious NEJM, New England Journal of Medicine, published the study examining the relationship between the drug industry funding and research conclusions about calcium channel blockers, a class of drugs used to treat high blood pressure. The NEJM study examines 70 articles on channel blockers and classified them into three categories favourable neutral and critical. It found 96% of the authors of favourable articles had financial ties to manufacturers of calcium channel blockers compared with 60% of the neutral authors and 37% of the critical authors.
Each study carries with it the requirement that authors should disclose financial interests or corporate ties, and in this study of 70 articles, only two scientists bothered to fill that in.
In 1999 at the Northwestern University in Chicago another study was conducted to look at the relationship between funding sources and conclusions reached, in studies of new cancer drugs. They found that studies sponsored by drug companies were nearly eight times less likely to report unfavourable conclusions than studies paid for by non-profit organisations.
In 1996 two journalists Dan Fagan and Marianne Lavelle reviewed recent studies published in major scientific journals regarding the safety of four chemicals, alachlor, atrazine, formaldehyde and perchloroethylene, used for dry cleaning clothes. All four of these substances have been linked to cancer in animals. All the Industry funded studies have found the chemicals safe while all non-industry studies have tended to see them as dangerous to human health.
While checking this reference, we found the book quoted was on the Internet Archive here Toxic deception : how the chemical industry manipulates science, bends the law, and endangers your health by Fagin, Dan; Lavelle, Marianne; Center for Public Integrity.
The 328-page book is a catalogue of industry foul play that you can read for yourself.
(The Internet Archive library lends books for 14 days free)
Of course, you can argue that is quite logical for people working in an industry to support the products of that industry but supporting the product by misrepresenting adverse reactions or ‘polishing’ the poor performance of the product constitutes fraud.
The results of the reviews we’ve captured above seem to very much bear out the “Follow the money”, syndrome rather than demonstrate any real efforts at impartiality.
On the subject of conflicts of interest there are a three particular ones I would like to bring to the fore.
There has long been a controversy over the connection, (or lack of) between the MMR vaccines and autism. Several ‘key’ studies, including these first two, have concluded this connection does not exist.
Madsen. – 2002
In this Danish study the histories of children born between 1991 and 1998 compared the rate of autism between children vaccinated with the MMR and those unvaccinated. The findings stated the autism rate in both groups was almost identical in fact it was claimed it was slightly lower in the vaccinated group then the unvaccinated group.
Seven of its eight authors were employed, when the paper was published, by the Danish Epidemiology Science Centre Research Group, which had been awarded numerous high value research grants by the CDC since the year 2000.
The group was lead by Poul Thorson, who was indicted for misappropriating a large portion of the CDC research budget by the US office of the Inspector General. As of 2020, he was still a fugitive from US justice. The 8th author of the paper was a CDC employee, and the study itself was largely funded by a grant from that same organisation.
These facts alone warrant a cautious approach when looking at the results of this piece of research, especially as the same authorities hold this report up as one of their cornerstone pieces of evidence supporting “No connection between vaccines and autism” argument.
De Stefano 2013.
A high-profile study also against MMR vaccine/connection
The study was funded by the CDC and two out of three authors were CDC employees. Frank Di Stefano was a senior CDC manager of longstanding, and at the time of the study he headed the CDC Immunisation Safety Office.
Can anyone imagine Frank turning in a piece of research that will see him lose his job, and the CDC losing all semblance of credibility? I certainly can’t, and I cannot imagine a more conflicting set of interests however hard I try. De Stefano declared in the paper that he had no conflicts of interest, when his entire life was on the bottom line. In a sane world, failing to declare his interests should be grounds for judicial review.
Grimaldi 2014.
A paper to investigate possible relationships between the Gardasil HPV vaccine and autoimmune diseases.
Sanofi Pasteur MSD, a French company jointly owned by Merck and Sanofi Pasteur is responsible for the production of the Gardasil vaccine, as well as funding the Grimaldi study.
A private company called LA SER who provided services and consulting to the pharmaceutical Industry, conducted this study with Grimaldi, their lead researcher and 2 others all being employed by LA SER at the time. The core business of LA SER seems to be supplying “cutting edge research outcomes designed to demonstrate the benefit to patients that products and health technologies provide.”
In short, the study to look at possible links between Gardasil vaccine and autoimmune diseases was funded by Gardasil, and contracted to a private company that specialises in delivering “agreeable epidemiological results” to its clients.
6 Doubly Flawed Studies
As if it wasn’t enough to bamboozle the readers of scientific works by burying vested interests out of sight, it seems all three of the above papers had some serious flaws in them too.
Madsen
The Danish Madsen study is one of the most cited studies in the area of vaccine connections with adverse effects, it was also one of the most effective studies at drawing the attention of the media, “Debunking “all of the theories about MMR vaccines causing Autism.
It begins by talking about over half a million subjects records being used for the study but in fact it only studied 263 vaccinated children and 53 not vaccinated. With such a tiny trial sample any error at all will affect the results dramatically. The authors verified the autism status of the children but not the vaccination status, they simply assumed their numbers were correct. A trial study is no place for assumptions, especially when the trial result claims to have found “Strong Evidence” of anything, good or bad.
The real kicker though is that the result of the trial clearly shows the data the trial is based on indicates a 45% higher risk of autism in the MMR vaccinated group, while the end result claims exactly opposite, an 8% lower rate.(Yellow Circles)
How can this be?
Note the calculation without adjustments shows a relative risk of 1.45 (45% increased risk), but that the final calculation has been “Adjusted” by the researchers to 0.92, a slightly lower risk of autism in the vaccinated group.
On its own, this sort of thing happens all the time, adjustments are made for all sorts of reasons. Often these calculations are not shown in a paper, to save space or over complication of the paper. BUT, when such an adjustment completely reverses the outcome of a trial? Then yes, the peers that review the paper, and anyone else, like you and I, for example, have an absolute right to see how this adjusted calculation is explained.
To say I find this fishy is an understatement, even without the knowledge that Mr Madsen is in the wind somewhere with a suitcase full of somebody else’s money…..
DeStefano 2013
Mr DeStefano was head of the CDC’s Immunisation Safety Office at the time of the report, which lent the “high profile” study a vast amount of media interest. This was to be the report that was to “lay the public mind at rest about the large number of vaccine doses for very young children and a possible causal link between them and the rates of autism”. On publication, the media message was loud and clear, that the study proved beyond doubt that multiple vaccines showed no link with autism risk.
An NBC headline at the time was “New study finds no link between ‘too many vaccines’ and autism,” in which the study author himself, Frank DeStefano stated
…
Only the study specifically looked at the supposed effect of too many vaccines, it looked at the “Multiple antigens on the development of autism.” Vaccines and antigens are not the same thing, an antigen is typically the fragment of a virus or bacteria that creates the immune response to the specific disease, and it is just one ingredient inside a vaccine. A vaccine contains not only that antigen but a whole lot more besides.
Other ingredients in vaccines include preservatives, stabilisers, and adjuvants, a component that helps stimulate immune response. (Cases exist where antigens alone do not provoke the required immune response –adding an adjuvant can get over that problem – is the official explanation).
I question whether the “Parental Concerns” that the CDC, FDA, and the media spoke of were focussed on the detail of the antigens inside a vaccine. My personal concern, as a parent myself, is that my child will have been injected with a complete, and often multiple vaccines on multiple occasions in its first 2 years of life, most of which contain compounds of aluminium and mercury and a variety of other compounds including formaldehyde.
Both of the metals, and formaldehyde are known to be toxic to humans and can remain in the body for a considerable time, so what is the effect of multiple doses in a short timeframe, not just of antigens but the vaccines as a whole? This study offers no answer to that question. Answering questions that were never asked in the first place is the language of politicians and their spin doctors, NOT scientists.
In short, the study claims to have proven multiple injections of vaccines to be safe while studying the outcomes and effects of multiple injections of antigen.
Is this a mistake?
The lead researcher was head of the CDC Immunisation Safety office at the time of the survey, what do you think?
Grimaldi 2014
Below is Table 1 from the Grimaldi study “Autoimmune Disorders and Quadrivalent Human Papillomavirus Vaccination (HPV) of Young Female Subjects”.
It is a “Retrospective case/control study”, which means a study based on known historical data that includes a Case group, made up from persons with a known medical condition and a Control group from healthy persons.
The 2 groups are matched to each other in terms of age, gender, and geographical location etc, like for like. Both groups are then checked against each other for exposure to the factor being studied in this case the Gardasil vaccine.
Think of a smoking study using a group of 50-year-old men with lung cancer against a group of 50-year-old men without lung cancer. If the data shows that the first group has had much more exposure to cigarette smoke than the second group it could indicate that smoking caused the cancer.
In this case, the matched groups were checked to the number of persons with an autoimmune disease that had the HPV vaccine against a similar, but healthy group.
But was the control group healthy? In the table below, notice the row headed “Number of Medications(any) taken within 24 months of recruitment”, and you will see that in both Case and Control column, the medication quantities are almost identical. (Yellow Arrows)
The flaw in this study is one of selection of the study group and the control group, and the plot thickens when we come to “At least one chronic co-morbidity” (Green Arrow).
What these numbers seems to show is that BOTH the case group and the control groups were suffering from autoimmune disease, and in the comorbidity area the control group seem to have been even sicker than the case study group.
There are more questions to be asked of the Grimaldi study but that will do for now, what we can be very sure of is that Grimaldi did not follow the standard procedure for case/control study design, and they did not explain how it was built this way and why.
Flawed as this study is, a more relevant question is why with all its faults did this paper pass peer review, and end up being cited as a pillar of proof of vaccine safety?
An acute failure of the entire system in fact.
These three studies are investigated at great length in an excellent book called Turtles all the way Down, by Anon.
Why are the authors anonymous? For the simple reason that by publishing something using your own name now seems to bring with it far more personal attacks than scientific investigation.
In this instance, the authors decided, quite rightly, that the message they wished to pass on was far more important than spending valuable time fending off personal attacks from people on an agenda
7 Attack the Messenger.
It is worth noting that the whole point of Berkes attack on Steingraber that we spoke of back in Section 4, was the attack itself, designed to discredit Steingraber in the eyes of the public rather than provide a clinical criticism of points made in the book to which Steingraber would have a right to reply.
Ad hominem attacks are the very opposite of science, and on social media these days they take place almost every minute of every day. They also form the number one tool of choice in the propagandists playbook.
A ‘Perspective’ piece from the Washington Post, last September, written by Marty Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins school of medicine and Bloomberg School of Health goes like this:-
“It’s okay to have an incorrect scientific hypothesis. But when new data proves it wrong, you have to adapt.Unfortunately, many elected leaders and public health officials have held on far too long to the hypothesis that natural immunity offers unreliable protection against covid-19 — a contention that is being rapidly debunked by science.”
“More than 15 studies have demonstrated the power of immunity acquired by previously having the virus. A 700,000-person study from Israel two weeks ago found that those who had experienced prior infections were 27 times less likely to get a second symptomatic covid infection than those who were vaccinated. This affirmed a June Cleveland Clinic study of health-care workers (who are often exposed to the virus), in which nonewho had previously tested positive for the coronavirus got reinfected. The study authors concluded that “individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from covid-19 vaccination.” And in May, a Washington University study found that even a mild covid infection resulted in long-lasting immunity.”
Here we have a bit of a dilemma. A man speaking up for the discussion of science, and unafraid to support changing attitudes and views. This cannot be right surely, this is the view of the vaccine sceptics and antivaxxers who must be silenced at all cost. But professor Makary supports vaccines, what on earth will the fact checkers do now for petes sake?
8 Precautionary Principles
“Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle,” which defined the principle as follows:
“When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”
For many years now the PR industry, working on behalf of big business, has been trying to get rid of the precautionary principle. It is claimed that it is an impediment to business, and often included in recent assaults on health and safety issues in general by western governments who view HSE as, “needless Red Tape, strangling the entrepreneurial effort”.
Having worked as an HSE consultant to some of the largest corporations on the planet, I take that personally. The oil and gas industry, prior to the year 2000, had an abominable HSE record with annual death tolls so high, they finally drove the industry to do something about it. (Simply because it was costing too much money to compensate victims families.) If you think this is mere cynicism, I have a 60-page PPT Presentation from 2002, that was used by an HSE team to persuade the CEO to get his act together or go broke. The CEO listened.
Partly as a result of such initiatives the OGP was formed, (now the IOGP), and oil and gas safety professionals from all over the world united to build probably the biggest and most effective HSE management systems available today, and the death toll and overall accident rate fell to a fraction of its former count, though it took a 20 years of hard work to achieve.
Now, we hear that all of our efforts were so much red tape?
That same PR industry thrives on the finance of big business, like a pilot fish thrives on cleaning the teeth of a shark. One of its most successful ‘products’ is the crisis training exercise, used to prepare industrial leaders in the event of a major failure. They believe that it is only right and proper that they assist their clients by predicting worst-case scenarios.
I have attended a few of these courses myself and come away from each of them feeling that I had learned something. How ironic then, that the industry must be warned, prepared, and protected from these dangerous events, but when it comes to the public and the planet wanting that same protection it “gets in the way of the entrepreneurial freedom.”
In todays high speed communication age, events become more obvious and immediate to us, they hit the headlines within minutes of happening. I remember all these from the news reports over the years and subsequent dives into the history books, Torrey Canyon, Exxon Valdez , three-mile island, Bhopal, Piper Alpha Hawks Nest, Love Canal, Times Beach, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and more recently Deepwater Horizon. All produced death, destruction, and global headline news within the first few hours of the event. All of these projects involved toxic, explosive, or radioactive products of a scientific nature.” (Click for a bigger list of Industrial disasters )
All of these “Unplanned events, although we call them accidents”, were preventable, they all carried known hazards and risks, and most of them had gone through major risk assessments and reams of documentation. Yet they all still went wrong, with disastrous consequences.
Those are all hazards and risks that we can see with our own eyes, but what is more insidious is the slow, creeping risk of long-term illness or pollution. Slow poisoning of the human body and the living landscape. There are still “Risk assessments” performed, but often in the form of scientific studies, but we have seen what can happen to them in the last few thousand words. There are no HSE management systems in the pharmaceutical industry. There is no HSE officer standing there with a STOP card and a written warning, and there should be.
Take pesticides for example, usually based on poisonous arsenic and copper salts before the invention of DDT. We always knew they were poisonous by virtue of the fact that they killed things they came into contact with, including people. DDT also killed things, it was specifically designed to, but for some reason was considered to be perfectly safe for humans. DDT was so safe that film footage exists of picnics with happy families sitting in clouds of the stuff. Where were the HSE folk? Probably having lunch
CFCS, or chlorofluorocarbons we’re extraordinarily safe when used as coolants in refrigeration plants, until we found a hole in the ozone layer.
Nobody even asked the question as to whether putting Tetraethyllead in our petrol was likely to lead to harm, so billions of vehicles used it and burned it over an 80 year period. Apparently TEL is good at reducing human IQ scores
Rolling tobacco up in paper tubes, setting fire to it, and inhaling the smoke was totally harmless for a long time. You know the rest.
History has shown us that all of these new innovations have taken a disastrous toll on the health of mankind, but nobody knew it at the time. This is the entire argument for the use of a precautionary principle. We teach our children to look left and right when crossing the road, we take precautions to protect our children because that is the sensible thing to do.
Why then do we not protect ourselves from new products for which there is no scientific evidence that supports their safety? Failing to do this, and failing to protect ourselves with preventative action condemns us to experiencing fatal and often long-drawn-out consequences long after the damage has already been done.
We have health and safety rules and regulations across most of the industrial landscape, but not in those parts of it that have the potential to kill people by the million.
Maybe its something to do with the money being made?
Smoking is related to cancer, but getting that untwisted message across has taken half a century to reach acceptance, likewise asbestos. How many people must we kill before we get a fair hearing? the answer is in the tens if not hundreds of thousands. Put that on a genuine risk assessment and see how far the project goes.
9 Afterword
At the moment there are numerous technologies still very much under review, and hotly contested. They include EMF Radiation (5G/Wi-Fi Etc), several vaccine positions, GMO products, pesticides, mRNA/gene therapy, and PFOS/PFAS (Forever) chemicals.
It is estimated that around 84,000 different chemicals are now in use world-wide and only 1% of them have ever been tested.
Anyone who ever owned a chemistry set as a kid will tell you that ‘interesting things’ happen when you mix different chemicals together. What are the odds of some ‘interesting things’ happening when you blend 84,000 different ones together in a single ecosystem? (…and when I was a kid most of those 84,000 chemicals didn’t exist in nature, they have subsequently been made, and very often from Hydrocarbons)
Yes we do indeed live in an age of technology, but tech was supposed to help us and liberate us from drudgery. It was not supposed to blow us to bits or slowly poison us and the entire planet.
To end on a lighter note,
is it…
10 Symposiums or Symposia?
Corporate sponsorship of scientific symposiums open a whole new set of doors to access ‘flexible management’ of content in medical journals. In 1992, the NEJM, (New England Journal of Medicine) published a survey of 625 symposiums which found that 262 of them (42%) were sponsored by a single pharmaceutical sponsor.
Drummond Rennie, a deputy editor of JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), sums up in just a few lines the whole rationale of “Scientific Symposiums” Just suppose…
“I’m the advertising guy for the drug.
I tell a journal I will give them $100,000 to have a special issue on that drug.
Plus, I’ll give the journal so much per reprint, and I’ll order a lot of reprints.
I’ll select the editor and all the authors.
I phone everyone who has written good things about that drug.
I say, “I’ll fly you and your wife first class to New Orleans for a symposium.
I’ll put your paper in the special issue of the journal, and you’ll have an extra publication for your c.v.”
Then I’ll put a reprint of that symposium on some doctor’s desk and say,
“Look at this marvellous drug.”
Another great site by the Dangerous Globe
