Pesticide Nun
01/04/2006
Jonathan Leake meets Georgina Downs, the one-woman whirlwind who’s holding
the pesticide industry and politicians to account
Downs lives in what looks like an idyllic village just outside of Chichester,
West Sussex. The home she shares with her parents is surrounded by trees and
fields – the kind of place most townies dream of.
When the family moved in over two decades ago, the adjoining field was used for
grazing but, within a year, it was ploughed up for arable crops – and the
spraying started.
Over the next few years, Downs’ health deteriorated, but she didn’t know why. By
1989, she had enrolled herself into a performing-arts college course, but kept
having to take time off with a mysterious set of ailments.
Rajasana Otiende, a former fellow student, said: ‘She had a big voice and was
very confident, but there was a shadow over her. Some days she’d come in and
have difficulty eating or drinking anything. When I asked her what was up, she’d
open her mouth and there were blisters everywhere, right down her throat. She
regularly suffered from headaches and flu-type illnesses as well, and was off
sick a lot. We wouldn’t see her for weeks on end.’
By her second year at college, Downs began suffering leg pain and had diffi
culty walking and, in September 1991, not long after she finished college, she
was hospitalised with severe muscle wasting, overall muscle weakness and other
chronic symptoms.
Downs was in hospital for a month, and underwent a series of tests and scans to
try to fi nd out why her health was failing. One by one, the doctors ruled out
diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS), motor neurone disease (MND) and
Parkinson’s disease, but still couldn’t identify the cause. Downs, now 32, puts
it more starkly, ‘I was absolutely devastated. I didn’t know what was wrong with
me; my body just completely failed me. I had only just turned 18 and kept
thinking that this is the time I should be out enjoying myself, but instead, I
could see everything slipping away, and there was nothing I could do about it.’
Eureka!
On leaving hospital, Downs was determined to find out what had made her so ill.
Was it her diet? Was it the cosmetics she was wearing? Was it a virus? For
months, she ran through a host of possible causes until, one day, as she was
sitting at home looking out of her window, she saw a tractor in the adjoining
field spraying something. Suspicions raised, Downs made inquiries, and found
that the tractor was spraying a cocktail of poisonous chemicals into the air
next to her home. Astonished by this, Downs started down the road that has
turned her into the scourge of the agrochemical industry.
First, she looked at how pesticides affected humans – and discovered striking
similarities between their effects and the symptoms she had been suffering.
These included the blisters, headaches, sore throats, flu-type fevers and bodily
pain. More worryingly, she came across studies showing that many pesticides can
cause longer-term damage by attacking the nervous system, promoting cancer and
disrupting hormonal systems.
For Downs, the obvious next step was to find out what she had been exposed to
but, when she asked the farmer, he would not tell her. What’s more, she found
she had no right to know: incredibly, farmers are under no legal obligation to
tell anyone what chemicals they have used or to provide any prior notifi cation
before they spray. Indeed, until January of this year, they were also under no
obligation to even keep records of what they had sprayed.
To anyone outside farming, this is an astonishing situation. Across Britain,
farmers spray around 31,000 tonnes of pesticides a year. All of these compounds
are designed to kill some form of life and to do so in extremely low
concentrations. Every experience with chemicals of this kind shows the need for
caution. In industry, this is a lesson that has been learned through bitter
experience of handling toxic substances like mercury, asbestos, lead and carbon
disulphide.
The historical poisoning of tens of thousands of workers with apparently low
levels of such substances means that modern industry is now more tightly
regulated by bodies like the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).
Farmers, by contrast, are under no legal requirement to be trained in the use of
sprays, and are free to purchase and use whatever chemicals they choose. Once
again, Downs makes the absurdity of this situation painfully clear: ‘A farm
worker is legally allowed to know what chemicals they are using and their
potential health effects, plus they are required to wear protective equipment;
yet members of the public, breathing in the very same air, are not.’
Barely pausing to draw breath, she continues, ‘The same double standards apply
far more widely. In particular, there is no obligation on farmers to observe a
buffer zone around buildings or other areas used by people such as paths and
parks.
‘This means that farmers are legally allowed to spray right up to the open
window of any occupied premises, whether it be a house, a school, a home for the
elderly or any office or workplace. There are literally hundreds of thousands of
places around Britain where farmland directly adjoins such establishments. One
report puts the number of premises at half a million. If the figure were
expanded to include all those homes, businesses and schools near enough to
farmland simply to be reached by spray contamination, it would run into the
millions.’
So, for people living or working near farmland, perhaps the only guide to their
risk of being poisoned is by checking to see what crops are growing around their
homes and workplaces. Most, however, only make the link between their condition
and exposure to farm sprays long after they have become ill.
What’s clear is that the type of crop grown makes a huge difference to the
potential exposure risk because each type has its own pesticide regime. Those
living near cereal crops, for example, might expect the national average of five
or six chemical dousings a season.
If, however, your local neighbourhood farmer is growing potatoes, then that
figure goes up to around 13 sprays in a season. And if their speciality is fruit
orchards such as apples, then 18 sprays a season is typical.
The risk is multiplied even more by the fact that many farmers will use a range
of different chemicals in each application and will change these as crops
mature, so dozens of different chemicals can be applied to a single crop – and
expose those living around it – over one season.
For Downs, it was powerful evidence that pesticides were the cause of her
illnesses, especially after she noticed that some of the sprays that she and her
family were breathing were also stripping the paint from her father’s car.
She tried complaining to the HSE and her local environmental health department,
but to no avail – because the farmer was breaking no laws.
At this point, and following the lack of any assistance from the authorities,
Downs decided it would be better to be away from home whenever the fields were
sprayed. No small sacrifice, given that the main spraying season can run for
five months or so. ‘I ended up staying on friends’ sofas and going from one
place to the next for weeks at a time,’ she explained bitterly. Adding with a
laugh, ‘I was literally living out of a suitcase. Friends nicknamed me ‘the bag
lady’.’
Enough’s enough
By 2001, however, while staying with a friend, she decided ‘enough was enough’
and vowed to fight back. ‘I remember thinking, if a farmer is legally allowed to
be doing this, then there has to be something seriously wrong with the
government’s policy. From that moment on, I knew what I had to do. I had to
change the government’s policy on pesticides.’
Downs knew nothing about politics. Her naivety at that time becomes apparent
when she admits that she thought her plan would only take a year. ‘I decided
that I would put everything else in my life on hold for a year – my singing,
work, relationships – and just give it my best shot.’ Five years on, and
Georgina is known by her friends as the ‘pesticide nun’, having dedicated
herself exclusively to this one issue.
What made her task even harder was that her prime target was not scientists or
ministers, but a mathematical model. It’s a model that has been used for years
by the government’s Advisory Committee on Pesticides (ACP) and the official
regulator, the Pesticides Safety Directorate (PSD), to work out the risk such
chemicals present to the public.
When scientists talk about mathematical models in such contexts, it implies some
kind of carefully calculated and calibrated means of working out genuine risk.
It also implies complexity of a kind that only another mathematician could
challenge.
Downs, however, demolished the model with simple logic. She discovered that the
model was no more than a piece of mathematical guesswork. It had never been
formally published or subjected to peer review in any scientific journal. What’s
more, it was based on the assumption that ‘bystanders’ would only receive
occasional, short-term exposure from the spray cloud at the time of the
application only and, furthermore, to only one individual pesticide at any time.
It was a model far removed from the real-life situation, where residents and
communities living near fields suffer long-term exposure to complex cocktails of
potentially deadly chemicals. As a tool for calculating real exposures and
health impacts, it was irrelevant.
The government’s chief scientific advisors on pesticides first became aware of
Downs in July 2001, when she attended the ACP’s annual open meeting. She asked a
number of penetrating questions, including whether each member of the committee
would be happy to be exposed in the same way as she and her family had been.
She left quite an impression on Professor David Coggon, the ACP’s chairman,
which was reinforced by regularly questioning him at subsequent conferences and
private meetings.
It was in early 2002, after being accosted by Downs for two hours in a hotel
bar, that Coggon invited her to give a presentation to the committee’s 2002 open
meeting on the adequacy of the ‘bystander risk assessment.’
Little did he realise what he had unleashed, as it was this presentation that
catapulted Downs and her campaign into the political and media spotlight. It
included a video to illustrate the dangers of crop-spraying, made in her own
back garden, starring a group of mannequins of a pregnant woman, two babies and
a young child, all having a mock picnic.
It was simple, but effective. The video, taken as the adjoining crops were
sprayed three times in one month, shows the mannequin family’s repeated exposure
to toxic chemicals as they sit on her lawn.
She said: ‘I asked the committee members to raise their hands if they thought
that the video showed an acceptable system for protecting public health. Not a
single hand went up.’
Downs subsequently presented the committee with a database of the diseases she
had found among rural residents and communities exposed to pesticides, which
included clusters of cancer, leukaemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Parkinson’s
disease, ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis) and asthma, among other conditions.
Downs’ data also included a substantial collection of case histories of people
who had linked their ill-health to pesticides – many supported by their doctors.
Some of the cases had been formally diagnosed as being pesticiderelated
ill-health, but there was no overall statistical analysis to support her case.
However, the sheer volume of cases and the consistency of symptoms in so many
geographically separate areas spoke for themselves.
Later, when the Royal Commission for Environmental Pollution (RCEP) carried out
its own investigation, it, too, drew attention to the number and similarity of
such cases, and recommended a proper, statistically based survey.
Downs’ ACP presentation led to a meeting with Lord Whitty, the then farming
minister, and Michael Meacher, the environment minister in December 2002. She
showed them her video, and presented the case for a change in the regulations
and legislation governing agricultural spraying. In particular, she wanted a ban
on crop-spraying nearhomes, schools, workplaces and other places of human
habitation, and direct public access to the information on the chemicals sprayed
on crops.
What happened next can be interpreted in two ways. Either the ministers didn’t
realise the sheer scale of the inertia, vested interests and bad science that
Downs was trying to tackle. Or they recognised a troublesome issue and cynically
decided to fudge their response for long enough to make Downs give up and go
away.
Whatever the thinking, the response of Alun Michael, who by this time had taken
over from Lord Whitty as the DEFRA (Department of Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs) minister responsible for pesticides, was to order two consultations on
the safety of the rules on crop-spraying – but to have them carried out by the
Pesticides Safety Directorate (PSD).
In effect, he was asking the PSD to investigate itself – which meant that, if it
found any faults in the system, it would involve criticising its own protocols
and, by implication, its own senior staff.
This, of course, was never going to happen. The PSD, along with the ACP and
DEFRA’s Chief Scientific Advisor Howard Dalton, advised ministers in June 2004
that the existing system was robust and provided adequate protection. The PSD
had cleared itself of any failures and declared everything in the pesticide
garden to be lovely. But its report to ministers has never been released to the
public.
Meanwhile, Downs had been busy with the media and a flurry of newspaper, TV and
radio reports had shown that this was an issue ‘with legs’. What’s more, Alun
Michael, the rural affairs minister, despite publicly expressing confidence in
the advice he had received, could see there had been a fudge. He decided to call
in the RCEP and ask it to examine all the issues raised by Downs.
Breakthrough?
This was the first time in history that the work of a single campaigner had
resulted in an inquiry by the Royal Commission. It was also likely to be the
best-ever chance of having a full and independent inquiry into the archaic
safety rules surrounding pesticide use in Britain.
The RCEP inquiry started on 3 August 2004, and ended with its final report,
entitled ‘Crop Spraying and the Health of Residents and Bystanders’, published
on 22 September 2005. By the end, it had heard evidence from a range of
individuals and organisations, along with government agencies and advisors, and
had travelled across Britain talking to people who reported that they, too, had
been poisoned by farm chemicals.
One rural resident, who gave oral evidence to the RCEP, was Sally Brown, who
lives surrounded by fields in a small village in Suffolk. Brown has reported
acute health problems, including sore eyes and throat, headaches and nausea. In
spring 1996, Brown was in her garden with one of her dogs when they were both
covered in spray as the tractor passed the boundary.
The following summer, Brown’s dog died of cancer and Brown was diagnosed with
breast cancer. This could have been a coincidence but, Brown told the RCEP, she
had always felt there could be a connection. She also informed the Commission
members of a number of cancer clusters in her village and in other places
nearby.
Another resident who gave evidence, Richard Bruce, has been recording cases of
cancer, leukaemia, Parkinson’s and other illnesses on the Isle of Wight for
years (see box on page 56). Bruce himself has been exposed to pesticides through
both his occupation and from living surrounded by sprayed fields, and now
suffers from long-term neurological damage, while his wife Shirley has had
breast cancer. Bruce’s local GPs also gave evidence to the RCEP in support of
Bruce’s case, adding further concerns about similar illnesses among other
islanders.
Among the many witnesses, Downs played a major role. She made a presentation to
the RCEP’s public meeting in September 2004 and gave oral evidence to the
Commission a few months later.
The RCEP recognised her as an expert as well as a witness, asking her to
peer-review their draft report before publication – something no other lay
person has ever been asked to do.
On 22 September 2005, Professor Tom Blundell, then chair of the RCEP, delivered
the judgment Downs had been waiting for. The mathematical model used by the
regulators was indeed deeply flawed, as Downs had previously identified, and the
chemicals approved under it were potentially dangerous to at least a million
people in rural areas.
He said farmers should become obliged to warn anyone at risk of exposure –
residents, workers, walkers and schools – whenever they planned to spray. Plus,
they should keep public records of all the chemicals used and be prepared to
show them to anyone on demand.
Blundell also wants the government to carry out a full epidemiological survey to
find any links between pesticides and chronic ill health.
It was the kind of result far beyond what professional environmental groups such
as the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) had been able to achieve, and they have
relatively huge budgets compared with what Georgina has been working on. It was
also one that industrial farmers and the agrochemical industry have been
dreading. Any data showing that pesticides can damage health would leave them
vulnerable to the same kinds of compensation claims that have beset companies
promoting tobacco or, in the past, using asbestos.
Such a result means Downs has won herself a reputation – and powerful enemies as
well as friends. But whatever people think of her, they can’t ignore her, as
witnessed by Farmers Weekly’s recent decision to include her in a list of the
top-20 power-players in UK farming.
Meacher, now a backbencher, is full of praise for Downs, albeit glad he is out
of her way. He said: ‘Georgina Downs is a phenomenal campaigner, the like of
which I have never met. She is the kind of person ministers dread because they
are so persistent. But you cannot ignore her because she knows her subject, and
what she is saying makes absolute sense.’ Blundell also praises her. He said:
‘She is a lay person, but she has provided us with a huge amount of information,
and it is always accurate and useful.’
However, even though the RCEP report has vindicated Downs, she is very concerned
that its recommendation that farmers observe five-metre ‘no-spray’ buffer zones
alongside residential property and other buildings, in an attempt to decrease
the likelihood of exposure for residents and bystanders, could ultimately
undermine the effectiveness of the report.
And as ever, she’s absolutely right. In principle, the idea of buffer zones is a
good one, but why five metres? The RCEP is supposed to be a strictly scientific
body, so one would expect it to have good research-based evidence to show that
spray concentrations drop rapidly over this distance.
In fact, the opposite is true. There is extensive research into the way chemical
sprays disperse in the air, and all show that they can spread over huge
distances.
One reputable study carried out in California showed that pesticides could be
detected up to three miles away from treated areas. Many such chemicals have
been detected as far as 25 to 50 miles away from the point of release.
Another study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical
Association linked pesticides used on farmland near schools with outbreaks of
acute illnesses among pupils. A wealth of similar studies have convinced seven
American states to impose no-spray buffer zones of up to 2.5 miles around
schools.
So why did the RCEP recommend a buffer zone of just five metres? According to
the RCEP, it was guided by evidence from the Silsoe Research Institute, a
government-funded centre for agricultural science that has since been closed
down. It had done research on how chemical sprays, in the form of droplets, can
drift, and on technological issues such as the design of spray nozzles.
It had not, however, carried out any research into longer-term exposure issues
such as those that Downs had been raising. Chemical sprays can, for example,
settle out of the air, only to be reactivated by subsequent wind or rain. Nor
had it looked at volatilisation or the longdistance spread of such chemicals.
Above all, neither Silsoe nor anyone else in the UK had ever looked at how
pesticide sprays affect the health of people living and working around sprayed
farmland.
For Downs and others, the decision to accept Silsoe’s recommendation turned an
otherwise excellent report from the RCEP into a potential disaster. If the
government adopted the five-metre recommendation, it would mean no effective
reduction in pesticide exposure, and a waste of all of their campaigning
efforts. Which makes it all the more surprising that PAN has also been in
support of a five- or six-metre buffer zone.
Downs said: ‘I remain at a loss to understand how the RCEP could have considered
five-metre buffer zones to be acceptable and protective. Most of the evidence
submitted, except that from Silsoe, showed it was far too small a distance. It
would be a travesty if Silsoe’s five-metre recommendation turns out to be the
undoing of the RCEP report.’
Since then, the picture has been muddied further with the ACP publishing its
response to the RCEP report. The ACP’s new report is a masterpiece of
obfuscation, with Professor Coggon, its outgoing chair, dismissing most
criticisms of its past failures.
More fudge, minister?
On the face of it, this leaves Lord Bach, the DEFRA minister now responsible for
pesticides, with a real headache. The government’s response to the RCEP report
is due in the summer but, with two of his main advisory committees at
loggerheads over whether crop-spraying threatens health, whose advice does he
take?
The risk is that this apparent clash in advice will lead simply to another
consultation or inquiry – and years of more delays. This is, of course, exactly
the result the agrochemical industry has successfully achieved with every other
report on rural pesticide use to date.
And yet, successive governments have had repeated warnings that agricultural
chemicals, just like many of those used in industry, are potentially toxic to
hundreds of thousands of people. There is no longer any doubt over the
scientific and medical issues. Nor is there any doubt that the companies making
such chemicals have long known about these concerns and done all they could to
avoid dealing with them. The real problem now lies with ministers who are too
gutless to act on the clear warnings and evidence.
In industry, medical evidence alone has never been enough to bring about new
safety legislation. It was the growing pressure of union organisations and the
threat of legal cases that prompted various governments to impose new safety
rules.
More recently, there has been a similar victory over restricting smoking in
public places as a way of preventing secondary smoke-inhalation. Again, the
medical evidence on passive smoking had been around for years, but was mostly
ignored by successive governments. It was only when those concerned by the
evidence became properly organised that their campaign became irresistible.
In rural areas to date, there has been no effective organisation representing
the interests of the hundreds of thousands of people being poisoned by
pesticides – and so there has been no change in the law.
Downs has single-handedly transformed that situation. She has won every battle
yet and, although she has not yet won the war, she has got closer than anyone
else so far.
Downs currently has a Judicial Review application lodged in the High Court
against the government for failing in its duty to protect the public from
pesticides.
She said: ‘I am not going to give up on this fight. There are too many people
having their lives ruined by these chemicals. The government and the farming
industry can throw what they want at me, but whatever it is, I’ll be back.’
PESTICIDE POISONING: THE EVIDENCE
Over the last five years, Georgina Downs has received thousands of emails,
letters and telephone calls from rural villagers all over the world testifying
to local clusters of acute and chronic illnesses and diseases. They are all
united by the fact that their villages are surrounded by fields that are
regularly sprayed with pesticides. The following are a fraction of the total,
but serve to illustrate their stories well.
- Over the last 10 years, Richard Bruce has been recording reported illnesses in
his rural village of Thorley, on the Isle of Wight, along with reports from
other nearby villages that are surrounded by sprayed fields. He has amassed over
242 reports of illnesses and diseases, including 106 cases of cancer, of which
40 – including cases of breast, stomach, bowel, brain, lung, skin, throat,
mouth, liver, pancreas and testicular cancers – and 18 neurological diseases –
including Parkinson’s disease, motor neurone disease (MND), multiple sclerosis
(MS) and myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) – were reported in his own village.
Other conditions include leukaemia, asthma, diabetes, joint and bone problems,
as well as 14 patients with serious heart disorders. Many of these conditions
have occurred over the last few years, with a number of them afflicting young
children.
- A small hamlet of 12 houses next to sprayed fields in North East Essex has
seen five cases of cancer – one brain, one testicular, one breast and two skin
cancers – as well as other conditions, including liver problems, over a period
of only five years. Other diseases reported outside of that time frame include
Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, labyrinthitis (inflammation of the inner ear),
epilepsy, miscarriages, asthma and acute allergic reactions.
- A Worcestershire village has reported four cases of leukaemia, nine cases of
cancer, including of the breast, prostate, bowel and skin, and six neurological
diseases in just 50 properties – again over a five-year period. In addition, a
number of dogs that had walked through fields shortly after crop-spraying have
died from cancer. There have also been reports where entire ponds of fi sh have
died following spraying.
- Lamberhurst, Kent, has seen 38 incidents of chronic illnesses within a
two-mile radius that include cancers (including of the breast and stomach),
brain tumours, arthritis, strange blood disorders, lupus, fibromyalgia
(widespreadmusculoskeletal pain) and ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic
fatigue syndrome), including three cases in one house alone surrounded by
sprayed fields).
- In Coleby in Lincolnshire, 10 schoolchildren suffered from vomiting,
headaches, fever and extreme rashes over the course of a few days. Their school
is located next to sprayed fields, and the attacks occurred during the height of
the spraying season.
- In Blackwater, on the Isle of Wight, there were five cases of breast cancer in
this tiny hamlet surrounded by sprayed fields.
- Wellingore, in Lincolnshire, had four cases of cancer and two cases of
leukaemia, all within a small area surrounded by pesticide-sprayed fields.
Jonathan Leake is Science Editor for The Sunday
Times.
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