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This One Will Run and Run - Which Means I'Ll Have to Run With It

Posted on: Wednesday, 2 November 2005, 06:00 CST

By Fordyce Maxwell

THERE is a jokey old newspaper cliche - no, not necessarily this column - that something "will run and run". I try to avoid using it, but it applies without irony to several subjects I have been involved with for what sometimes seems like several lifetimes but is actually only long years.

These include continuing conspiracy theories about who deliberately started the foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001, why genetically modified crops will kill us all, the controversy over wind farms, the risks of using organo-phosphates, and most recently whether pesticides sprayed on crops affect the health of people living nearby.

All will run and run because there is no chance of pros converting antis, or vice-versa. Arguments become circular, and protagonists quite often get to know and quite like each other without ever coming close to agreement.

That is why I went yesterday to a discussion on crop pesticides and human health, organised by the British Crop Production Council in Glasgow, with mixed feelings.

As a journalist - troublemakers that we are - I hoped for some vigorous and (let's be honest) bad-tempered exchanges. As a layman with an interest in the subject, I hoped to learn more about it, perhaps get a fresh perspective.

As something of an expert in "run and run" debates, what I didn't expect was the declaration of a Pauline conversion from any participant - which was just as well, because there wasn't one.

AT THE end of the day, Gary, to be honest with you, we ended up back where we started. But there were some pertinent points, I felt, along the way related to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution's recent report. This concluded that there was a plausible case for a link between crop pesticides and allergies and illnesses suffered by local residents and bystanders. It recommended five- metre buffer zones round fields, more research into pesticides and farmers giving advance warning of spraying.

Now read on: advance warning might not be a good thing, said Professor Alan Boobis, a toxicologist at Imperial College, because such a warning could trigger stress that did more damage than anything likely from, say, low-level radioactivity. He also suggested that there was now strong national and international scientific opinion that most of the symptoms of ill health reported were " a physical manifestation of underlying anxiety and related psychological disorders".

In some places - a David Dimbleby Question Time or any morning chat show you care to mention - that statement might have been "light blue touch-paper and retire" time. Instead, there was a murmur of assent, only Georgina Downs, doughty anti-crop pesticide campaigner, nipping in later to assure him that there was nothing imaginary about the health problems of millions.

The problem, said Professor Boobis, is that trying to distinguish between mind and matter would be expensive in time, money and manpower. Nor, he said when I asked him later, as a toxicologist and scientist speaking personally, would he make crop pesticides and human health a priority. Air pollution and diet balance related to cancer, to name but two, are much more important.

PROFESSOR Joyce Tait, of Edinburgh University, hit nails harder on the head. Anyone trying to take policy decisions on the basis of evidence finds the scientific base increasingly challenged and eroded, she said. We automatically assume that industry or government agency advice is biased. Why don't we assume the same about pressure groups or campaigners? Such as, although she did not say so, Georgina.

When ill, there is a natural human reaction to look for a cause and someone to blame, she said, and crop spraying is complicated by the fact that a significant minority of the population rejects the need for it: "These deeply held values are likely to influence the cause identified for the kinds of health problems reported."

She concluded: "For a society that increasingly makes its decisions on the basis of what people worry about and who complains the loudest, rather than on evidence of harm, the end point is unlikely to be a healthier or wealthier society."

Georgina, a most articulate campaigner with a frightening knowledge of her subject, would have none of that. Talk of psychology was wrong and misleading, she said. The campaign will continue, Or, as we say in the trade, "run and run".

Source: Scotsman, The

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