16. Health and Uncertainty
In the mid 1980’s the media’s attraction to Rechem was strongest when it came to the incidence of eye abnormalities in babies. Neither ReChem nor the government would entertain speculation that incineration was in any way to blame for birth defects around the incinerators. Thereafter, to mention eye abnormalities and ReChem in the same sentence was something to be done only with careful arrangement of the words, plus the consideration of its context and predictions of what the company could read into it. The verbal treatment of deformities and deaths in cattle also demanded circumspection. In relation to the Pontypool plant, one farm in particular got attention, as did a number of children with eye abnormities, but around Bonnybridge the problems were more prevalent. The company’s continued hostility eventually made the subject pretty much of a no-go area for the media. I thought that the stifling situation was unhealthy and that open well-balanced coverage of health issues should have been accepted as part of the territory of toxic waste incineration.
As reasonable as it was for ReChem to resist any association with eye defects it was also natural for Abigail Bown’s parents in New Inn to keep ReChem in mind when wondering about the cause of their daughter’s rare eye abnormality. They lived on the hillside which lay in the prevailing wind from the incinerator.Abigail was born with one of her eyes noticeably small, a condition known as microphthalmia. As many parents would be, they were inquisitive about possible causes of the abnormality. There was no obvious explanation for it and this type of highly unusual defect and was typically dealt with at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, by consultant Richard Collin who was inquisitive about the apparent clusters. Another baby, whose family had left the area but who had been conceived in New Inn, was Buckley Thomas. Buckley was born with two missing eyes (anophthalmos) and an incomplete forebrain. There were reports of baby not far away with two small eyes, (microphthalmos) and of a child with a missing eye living a little further away. With an even greater incidence of such abnormalities near the Scottish incinerator in Scotland it would have been hard for any parent not to be suspicious of the array of toxic materials on their doorstep, particularly if they regularly inhaled the chemicals in the air around them. Although a number of natural factors could contribute to such abnormalities in humans, and whilst alternative explanations were proposed for the animal problems, it seemed reasonable for people to consider the possibility of a chemical cause.
The world had slowly come to acknowledge the abnormalities present in babies born in the herbicide-sprayed regions of South Vietnam, during and after the calamitous war. The possibility of a chemical connection with those abnormalities extended to defects in children of American and allied servicemen.In 1984 I met Australian Vietnam veteran Jim Weirs, who had fathered a son with missing fingers and was leading a fight for compensation for war veterans in similar positions. Millions of gallons of dioxin containing defoliant were used by the U.S. troops in Operation Ranch Hand from 1962 to 1971, in order to strip the luxuriant Vietnamese vegetation that kept the opposing forces out of sight. Complex chemicals were given common names derived from the different coloured bands on their drums, with the most popular being Agent Orange and whose main producer was Monsanto. By 1970 the US government recognised that one of the constituents of Agent Orange, namely 245-T, was a problem. Its use became banned in most applications in the United States and Agent Orange spraying in Vietnam was eventually halted.Monsanto, Dow Chemicals and Diamond Shamrock paid compensation to American veterans in 1984. Their New Zealand, Canadian and Australian allies were compensated in the same year, but none of the settlements carried any admission of guilt by the manufacturers. Therefore, despite the compensation connected with dioxin in Vietnam, ReChem’s writ-happy period, which peaked in 1989, occurred in the context of dioxin’s legal innocence. The Vietnam dioxin disputes themselves continued beyond my campaigning years and there was a further settlement in 2006 when Monsanto and Dow paid compensation to allied South Korean Veterans, although a year earlier Brooklyn Federal Court had dismissed the Vietnamese victims’ claim.
Agent Orange was itself a mixture of the herbicides 245-T and 24-D.One of the by-products of the manufacture of 245-Ttrichorophenoxyacetic acid was the form of dioxin known as 2,3,7,8 tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin or 2,3,7,8 TCDD. It was present in agent orange in only a parts-per-million concentration. I’d followed the course of the Agent Orange controversy well before my involvement with ReChem and I was aware that 2,3,7,8 TCDD was sometimes described as the most toxic chemical in existence. What’s more I also knew it could be produced in the burning of PCBs. Accidental fires in capacitors and transformers were known to have produced dioxin and New York’s Binghamton building fire did so in a big way. My rough calculations meant that incomplete incineration could produce more dioxin from a barrel of PCBs than was contained in a barrel of Agent Orange. Treading a legal tightrope, I supported the local parents in their quest for answers about the unusual eye defects, though I knew that it was unlikely that a causal link between the incinerator and eye abnormalities would ever be established. An investigation instigated by the Welsh Office was of no reassurance, since the conclusion that the incidence eye defects in the area was insignificant came from a survey where the children who had been real enough in the flesh and in the media didn’t exist in the Government data. The error may have been due to problems with the classification of defects and/or the notification system in the Health Service but it was the government’s conclusion, rather than reality, that went on record. Thereafter, I found it difficult to have faith in epidemiological studies, particularly if a negative outcome was politically appropriate.
As well as the administrative oversights in health surveys there were other distorting factors, one of which surfaced specifically in connection with one particular child’s missing eye. Abergavenny is about ten miles north of Rechem and seemed far from Rechem’s footprint, but I had a ‘phone call from Robert Wade, an Abergavenny solicitor, who asked to see me. A parent of an Abergavenny child with a missing eye had contacted him.I wasn’t prone to surprise by the manipulation of medical data, but this example was astonishing, if I interpreted it correctly. ReChem’s high-profile public relations machine had extended into offering assistance in the diagnosis of local health problems in animals or in humans. I was suspicious of the offer but in the Abergavenny affair ReChem’s help was accepted by the young girl’s parents. The company employed a local eye consultant, and the Abergavenny solicitor told me that the investigation pointed to an ancestral occurrence of a missing eye. When the solicitor looked into the family’s ancient missing eye he discovered the ancestor had lost it in accident when aged 14.
I thought the use of medical expertise in this way was despicable but it wasn’t as sinister as my earliest encounter with anomalies lurking behind official data. The disturbing Abergavenny experience, late in 1985, had been preceded by the shortsighted Welsh Office report on congenital abnormalities, but my exposure to the pitfalls of medical data began in my first year of campaigning., with the 1984 report on such abnormalities. The data on central nervous system defects including anencephaly and spina bifida appeared reassuring - until I was contacted by consultant radiologist, Dr Anthony Jones. He explained that the published figures did not count foetuses which were terminated as a result of his consultations with parents following the radiological detection of abnormalities. In one of the categories listed in the report, the undisclosed therapeutic terminations were many times more than the published figure of defects in elective births.The consultant who contacted me was deeply concerned about the flaw and was also concerned about the risk to himself from revealing it. He said he was happy for me to take it forward externally whilst he agitated internally. Eventually the system was corrected and although nothing I did could have been traced back to him, I learned that his own efforts did have personal consequences.
My pessimism about the accuracy of epidemiological studies was reinforced time after time, so I learned to keep health issues at a safe distance in campaigning work. With epidemiology to one side, I retained my keen interest in toxicology, which had been an underlying cause of my concern about the Pontypool plant. Through that interest I encountered many kindred spirits in the medical field who encouraged me in my efforts. I continued to speak about the potential for ReChem’s chemicals to produce birth defects and I would acknowledge that families rightly sought explanations for highly unusual eye abnormalities. I might paint the Pontypool plant as a natural suspect but I would not suggest that ReChem was the cause of anything that couldn’t be proved. By 1989, regardless of what the Evening Standard wanted to hear from me when its reporter Colin Adamson called on me, I was skilled in separating suspicion from certainty and would never be caught out.