Mass Poisoning (Camelford 1988)

Not all examples of mass poisoning are subtle

I have recently been contacted by a documentary film company interested in re-visiting the most overt mass poisoning of the British population in recent history. I do hope that they are sufficiently brave to bring this story to the general public as there is nothing but unfinished business to pursue and uncover in this unfortunate event.

As a prelude to what I hope will follow I am copying below an extract from my book concerning Camelford.

Camelford

Camelford is a small Cornish town made infamous as the site of the United Kingdom’s worst known mass poisoning of the human population. On the 6^th of July 1988, twenty tonnes of aluminium sulphate, used in the treatment of potable water, were added, inadvertently directly into treated water supplying 20,000 people in Camelford and surrounding areas. At the time the supply of clean drinking water was under public ownership but was about to be privatised in a share offer to the public. This reference to the eventual privatisation of potable water supplies throughout England and Wales in 1989 is of significance as it is widely accepted to be the basis of the cover up that followed and continues to this day.

My personal involvement with Camelford began with the opening of a new enquiry in 2001. Upon perusing the details available, I immediately smelt the proverbial rat as the experts appointed to the Department of Health, Committee on Toxicology (DH COT) to review Camelford had absolutely no relevant (or even irrelevant) expertise in aluminium. The only legitimate members of the expert panel were probably two lay members representing the citizens of Camelford, Doug Cross and Peter Smith. As someone who in 2001 was already well known for their research on aluminium and human health, for example, I had just edited an acclaimed book on aluminium and Alzheimer’s disease; I waited in vain to be called to give evidence to the expert panel. Instead, I made contact with them and specifically a member of the secretariat, George Kowalczyk. George was enthusiastic to receive my input and asked me to write a report detailing aluminium chemistry and toxicology relevant to Camelford. I was then asked to give evidence to the expert panel in person and answer questions on my report. Upon doing so the committee chair Professor Frank Woods thanked me personally and asked if I would be prepared to help the committee in drafting the section of their report that covered the environmental toxicology of aluminium. I never heard from Frank Woods again in respect of this request and when eventually their draft report was published in 2005 it did not contain any of the information I had provided as written or oral evidence. It was clear from the draft report that another cover up was developing. To all intents and purposes aluminium would not be considered as a critical criterion in their investigation of Camelford. Twenty thousand people had been poisoned by drinking water containing 600 mg/L aluminium over several weeks and the committee charged with investigating the disaster were not considering any ill effects relating to aluminium. The so-called expert committee were certainly not interested in science and I wrote a letter to the British Medical Journal to this effect that was signed by more than 50 aluminium scientists from around the world. One has to ask the question as to what changed Frank Woods’ mind about involving me in drafting the part of the report concerning the environmental toxicology of aluminium? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the day after he asked for my help his committee took evidence from two individuals, Nick Priest and James Edwardson on behalf of the Aluminium Federation? I was told by the Department of Health’s representative on the enquiry, Frances Pollitt, that it was a complete coincidence that these two known ‘aluminium ambassadors’ gave their evidence the day after me. However, I also asked if it was also a complete coincidence that, just a few years earlier in 1999, Frances Pollitt had been the individual at the Department of Health who had signed off a grant for £100,000 to Nick Priest to carry out research on aluminium and human health. It is somewhat ironic if also absurd that the only grant (probably ever) to research aluminium and human health awarded by the British Government was to a consultant to the aluminium industry. A grant that subsequently never produced a single published outcome. It is just one aspect of this scandal that the British taxpayer was not only poisoned by Camelford but also contributed financially to its cover up by Government. I am sure that Pollitt was charged by the Government to get the COT draft report on Camelford accepted and published as soon as possible to draw a line under Camelford once and for all. Neither Ms Pollitt nor the Government were prepared for what happened next!

I met Doug Cross for the first time in 2000, I think, at a meeting in Northern Ireland where I was talking, unsurprisingly, about the environmental toxicology of aluminium. Doug introduced himself as a forensic ecologist and in truth, I did not really understand what that meant and I do not remember much else about our meeting. The next time we met was when I gave evidence to the DH COT expert panel on Camelford. While Doug was on the panel as a lay member, it was quickly obvious that he knew substantially more about aluminium than anyone else. He asked good questions and it was clear that he wanted to know the role played by aluminium in the incident. After this meeting, Doug stayed in touch with me through the occasional email. Shortly after the release in 2005 of the DH COT Draft Report on Camelford I received a telephone call from Doug. He was to the point. He told me that his wife had died, that the circumstances were unusual, and that he wanted me to organise a post mortem on his wife’s brain. Doug’s wife was 44 when she, like many, was exposed to high levels of aluminium in Camelford drinking water. Fifteen years later in May 2003, she was experiencing poor mental health and in April 2004, she died. Because of the unusual circumstances the Taunton Coroner, Michael Rose, agreed to further analyses of her brain tissue. I asked one of the world’s leading neuropathologists at that time, Professor Margaret Esiri at Oxford University if she would carry out the neuropathology and she agreed. She found that Doug’s wife had died of an aggressive form of Alzheimer’s disease called congophilic amyloid angiopathy (CAA) and she noted that the detail of the case was unique and certainly so for someone in their fifties. The Coroner raised the question of aluminium and Camelford and Professor Esiri sent me five samples of brain tissue from the Oxford Brain Bank. We measured the tissues blind and only one gave a high content of aluminium, actually a very high content of aluminium. It was the Camelford case and four further brain tissue samples confirmed the high content. A small earthquake of interest in Camelford ensued, fuelled by significant media interest. In those dim and distant days, the press were still allowed to report upon the toxicity of aluminium in humans. While The Lancet shied away from reviewing the science, in spite of an encouraging telephone conversation, Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry reviewed and accepted the manuscript within just a few weeks.  The scientific paper that followed in early 2006 was titled; ‘Severe cerebral congophilic angiopathy coincident with increased brain aluminium in a resident of Camelford, Cornwall, UK’ and the DH COT Draft Report was to remain a draft report for another eight years. There are times in science as in life when serendipity simply takes over the course of events. The Coroner opened an inquest into the death of Doug’s wife and he would leave no stone unturned in finding the truth behind her death. Part of the inquest involved him asking Somerset County Council to fund what became our seminal study on the aluminium content of sixty human brains. Without this funding, that amounted to over £100,000; it would not have been possible to know everything that we know today concerning aluminium in human brain tissue. If the Coroner’s inquiry achieved nothing else this was a landmark moment in our research and research on aluminium in human neurological disease. Of course, the inquest achieved a great deal more and it was an unusual experience giving evidence in the spring of 2012. The courtroom was traditional and foreboding, the latter accentuated by the presence of several men in dark suits who sat and listened but communicated with no one. Neither with themselves nor with the Government’s representatives of the now privatised water industry. The Coroner delivered a narrative verdict but in so doing, he made it very clear that all of the evidence pointed towards a role for aluminium in the death of Mrs Cross, it was a narrative verdict because it was impossible to link the aluminium in her brain tissue directly with Camelford. I am sure that this verdict came as some relief to the Government and, indeed, to the men in dark suits. However, it set a very important precedent. It is the first and last time to my knowledge that in a court of law aluminium was found guilty of causing Alzheimer’s disease. The Coroner, a very good man, was ahead of his time since it was several years later in 2017 before I was prepared to convict aluminium of the same crime. About a year later in 2013 the final DH COT report on Camelford was published. It included only minor concessions to the case of Mrs Cross and these were worded in the form of suggestions for future research. A number of meetings involving the COT chair Frank Woods, Frances Pollitt, myself and Margaret Esiri followed. However, these were sullied by the presence of a representative from the aluminium industry, Professor Carol Brayne, a Cambridge epidemiologist working on Alzheimer’s disease. No explanation was offered for her involvement though the fact that she headed the study that supplied us with brains for our seminal sixty brain study may have been a factor. Brayne showed her true aluminium colours when she retrospectively prevented us from knowing the clinical status of the sixty donor brains. She insisted that only her team should carry out statistical analyses of the data from the donor brains. Of course, we were not prepared to hand over our unpublished data to a representative of the aluminium industry. We published our data in two separate papers and Brayne continuing to the last even roped in the chair of the brain bank, Dame Ingrid Allen, to write to both the vice-chancellor at Keele, Professor Nick Foskett, and the editor-in-chief of the journal, Professor George Perry, to try to prevent publication. I am happy to say that in this instance at least academic freedom and transparency of information prevailed and Brayne’s efforts were in vain. It is perhaps needless to say that the recommendations for further research made in the Camelford Final Report in 2013 have been totally ignored. However, we have had the opportunity to investigate brain tissue from three individuals known to have been affected by Camelford. In each case we have found elevated levels of aluminium coincident with unusual neuropathology directly linked to congophilic amyloid angiopathy (an example of early onset Alzheimer’s disease), sporadic or late onset Alzheimer’s disease and adult onset epilepsy. Three out of three cases implicate aluminium in disease aetiology. One has to wonder what would have been found if there had not been a cover up?

Please find below links to published papers concerning victims of Camelford.

Epilepsy - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05627-8 

https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad200838 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00775-019-01710-0 

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/12/2129 

Cross Case - https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/8/1459 

https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/77/7/877 

Camelford Case - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nan.12417 

Opinion Paper - https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease-reports/adr170010 

100 Brain Study - https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad120766 

https://academic.oup.com/metallomics/article-abstract/4/1/56/6016058?redirectedFrom=fulltext 

Control data - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64734-6 

So, followers of Dr’s Newsletter, watch this space. Just perhaps this story will be told.