Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

A leading authority on the harmful effects of aluminium has criticised
the latest conclusions of the independent team of scientists commissioned
by the government to investigate the Camelford incident. In July 1988, 20
tonnes of aluminium sulphate were accidentally dumped into the wrong tanks
at the Lowermoor treatment works near the Cornish town of Camelford. As
a result aluminium entered the water supply.

In its second report, just published, the commission says it expects
the aluminium will cause no lasting physical harm.

Barbara Clayton, professor of metabolism at the University of Southampton
and chairman of the committee, says the report takes into account evidence
from 80 scientists, 130 other sources and the world literature on aluminium.
She says the conclusions ‘represent a consensus view’.

But Donald McLachlan of the University of Toronto challenges this: ‘There
are no real data to say that.’ While long-term exposure to aluminium has
been shown to damage the brain and can lead to memory loss, he says no one
has studied the effects of a one-off high dose of aluminium.

McLachlan, director of the Centre for Research in Neurodegenerative
Diseases, linked what happened at Camelford to ‘running in and out of a
nuclear reactor quickly, rather than being exposed for a long time’.

Clayton’s team first reported on the incident in July 1989. The team
reconvened when a number of later studies suggested that some people were
suffering persistent symptoms – skin problems, pains in the joints and memory
loss, for example. The team’s second report reviews these studies. The report
concludes that the accident itself and its aftermath has caused ‘real mental
and physical suffering’ in some 400 people. But it argues that the trauma
of the situation, and not aluminium, is to blame.

The team condemns much of the research it reviews as unscientific. Jim
Edwardson, director of the Medical Research Council’s Neurochemical Pathology
Unit in Newcastle upon Tyne and a member of the committee, says many of
the studies were ‘absolutely awful work – badly designed and badly interpreted’.

The team has itself attracted widespread criticism for not commissioning
research into the effects of the incident. Only in the second report does
the committee give a concrete suggestion for a study. Junior health minister
Stephen Dorrell says agreement has been reached ‘in principle’ for the MRC
to test whether some people have become ‘sensitised’ and so more prone to
the effects of aluminium as a result of the accident.

The report says further epidemiological research ‘would not throw light
on any continuing physical after effects of the incident, due to the lack
both of appropriate control groups and of relevant objective tests’. McLachlan
disagrees. He believes there should be a long-term, controlled follow-up
of the people of Camelford. He also argues that measurements should be made
of the amount of aluminium in people’s bodies, to compare Camelford volunteers
with a group of controls. ‘There will be no definitive answer until the
studies have been done,’ says McLachlan.