Chemical Poisoning: Brave New World of Zero Risk

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22 Dec 2005 16:48:59 -0000

Health Supreme Update: Chemical Poisoning: Brave New World of

Zero Risk

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Health Supreme Update: Chemical Poisoning: Brave New World of Zero

Risk

 

2005.12.22 17:48:58

 

 

December 22, 2005

 

 

Chemical Poisoning: Brave New World of Zero Risk

 

 

Brave New World of Zero Risk - Covert strategy in British Science

Policy is Martin Walker's latest exposé of scientific corruption. The

book takes the chemical and pharmaceutical multinationals to task for

bending science in the name of industrial progress and for riding

roughshod over the human tragedies of people suffering injury from

toxic chemicals.

 

sprmrkt-fd_c 2.jpg

 

Supermarket Emma Holister

 

An incisive investigative writer, Martin Walker is widely known

for his monumental Dirty Medicine, which documents the collusion of

modern medicine with a greed-driven pharmaceutical industry. In 2004

Walker took up the fight for the chemically injured with another book,

Skewed. He examines the scandalous re-definition as a psychiatric

problem of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and a related cluster of

illnesses. Walker tells of the chemical industry's collaboration with

psychiatric and medical " experts " who would have us believe that

physical symptoms of chemical poisoning are pure imagination and that

the sufferers need a dose of psychiatric drugs and perhaps some

motivational therapy.

 

Brave New World of Zero Risk, available free for download here,

continues where Skewed left off. But more than that - Zero Risk shows

how pharma, food and chemical giants deal with those who might depress

their already threatened profits even further by exposing weak points.

Vaccine researcher Dr Andrew Wakefield fell from grace after finding a

connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. Dr Arpad Pusztai paid

with his carreer for insisting that the rats he fed GM potatos in what

may well have been the only properly conducted GMO feeding experiment,

suffered organ damage as a result.

 

- - -

 

Zero Risk contains extensive documentation on how front groups

such as the innocent-sounding Social Issues Research Center, known for

its strong support of hormone replacement therapy, are slanting the

debate the way industry wishes.

 

" The pharmaceutical corporations can no longer be seen as a

part of some social superstructure " , says Walker, concluding a chapter

on science and its apparently senseless direction. " Their need for a

research base, for trial subjects, for organisations to agree

licensing and other regulatory matters, together with their need for

markets and consumers of their products, means that, like a

metastasised cancer, their growth now extends into all areas of

society, which has become a massive human laboratory. "

 

The question becomes: What kind of medicine are we going to have -

corporate or scientific?

 

The quackbusters, pharma's shock troops who attack doctors that do

not toe the line, are discussed with a fair bit of history and

pointers to their parent organization, the so-called skeptics.

'De-bunking' activities are generally directed towards health

practitioners that use cutting edge protocols such as mercury-free

dentistry, nutritional immune enhancement and detoxification for

chemical injury.

 

Mercury,-Relax!_c 1.jpg

 

Mercury - Ralax! Emma Holister

 

Genetically modified foods are pronounced safe and promoted by

industry groups. The decision process that led governments to the

unquestioning acceptance of genetic modification as an element of

science policy, according to Walker, was arrived at behind closed

doors. He describes how the policy was put into effect in the UK with

these words:

 

" In clearing the runway for bioscience, New Labour was also

clearing it of its citizens. There is no room for ordinary citizens'

input into the new world of science, so they have dropped them utterly

from the equation, and 'steak' holders (the better fed citizens), are

now the powerful vested interests... "

 

 

Evidently, people are no longer needed, except as 'consumers'.

Pressure groups supplant public input with a vague concept of

'listening to the stake holders'.

 

Covering up the harm done by industry seems to be a common

practice. After citing two instances, the Spanish " contaminated oil "

scandal of 1982 that killed hundreds and a 1988 Camelford (UK) water

poisoning incident, where 20 tons of toxic chemicals ended up in the

town's drinking water, Walker highlights the rationale behind the

crazy idea that people suffering from chemical or other environmental

pollution are making it all up:

 

" When you deny the existence of illness presented by patients,

you also have to deny the mental health of those patients. So much

more so is this the case with environmental illness, where the

psychiatrist can first attack the very mind frame of both patient and

alternative therapist. In a rational world, the subject who is

affected by invisible rays from mobile phones or computer screens can

be made to appear mentally unbalanced. If you can see the cause, then

it is the job of crisis management, psychiatry, psychology or PR,

either to convince everyone that it is not there, or disguise it as

something else. "

 

" As the stakes get higher and the crack in the floodgates

widens, more subtle plans have to be drafted. These are plans that

start at the beginning by defining as mentally ill, those who believe

that modern technological ['wonders'] can produce chronic health

damage. Mental illness is undoubtedly the best fallback position for

those responsible for creating environmental illness. And so it is

that psychiatrists become part of the front line troops in denfence of

the state and its corporate partners. "

 

Science is being used to cover up, rather than reveal, the effects

industrial 'progress' has on our health. Contrary views are rigorously

suppressed. Walker says that scientists themselves have to look at how

industry uses them to help suppress the evidence of harm.

 

" At the centre of this almost surgical censorship, which has

developed like a cancer in society, are working scientists. On

questions of science, it is imperative that scientists themselves wise

up to the way in which they and their work are being manipulated. "

 

Caught your interest yet? You can download the PDF of Martin

Walker's book. Don't forget to leave a small donation. Walker provides

his work for free, but he does need to eat as well...

 

If, instead, you want to get an even closer look at the subject

matter, here is a message from Emma Holister, artist and campaigner

for health, who forwards a recent essay by Martin titled " Realpolitik

and ME " , which you find below.

 

- - -

 

chmcalWrfare_c 2.jpg

 

Chemical warfare Emma Holister

 

teensy-weensy_c 1.jpg

 

Teensy weensy Emma Holister

 

Here is Emma's message:

 

Martin Walker once again takes us on a guided tour along the

sordid money trail of pharmaceutical funding that fuels the

psychiatric lobby's defining of M.E. [Myalgic Encephalopathy] as a

psychiatric condition rather than an organic illness.

 

I consider my own illness, Candida, to be a cousin of M.E., as it

is also caused by chemical injury. Those chemicals/drugs are the

massively profitable products of the very same chemical and pharma

companies who are relentlessly defining these illnesses as psychiatric

conditions for which they recommend yet more of their lethal products,

anti depressants. Candida is treated as both a 'minor fungal

infection' and a stress related psychiatric disorder by most of the

medical profession. It is also a major source of profit in the pharma

AID$ industry, candida being one of the most common ailments of 'AIDS'

sufferers.

 

As these issues are so close to my heart and personal campaigns I

have included some cartoons that I feel are related.

 

Emma xxx

www.artmargin.com

 

 

- - -

 

8 November 2005

 

Realpolitik and ME

By

Martin J. Walker

 

We live in a period where everything is spin, where the truth is

rarely told about public policy and where many public arguments are

disingenuous. However, during the contemporary period, everything is

confusion. Only when we look back are we able to see clearly how

social reality was constructed.

 

This situation makes it very difficult for campaigners, or those

trying to voice a dissenting view to Government or its agencies. While

thirty years ago, it might have been possible to engage in a

peripheral dialogue with government, today, government and its many

agencies is a secretive, shadowy organisation which often invites

campaigners to wrestle with phantoms. In contemporary society, there

is, in short, no point at which the clear demands of the people might

be put to government and a considered answer returned.

 

One of the principal reasons for this is that over the last fifty

years, the government has begun increasingly to act on behalf of

hidden constituents. Instead of gauging and responding to the needs of

the people, they have increasingly, in the field of health, begun to

act on behalf of corporations, foisting their demands onto the public

in the form of policy. In some areas, this corporatisation of

government is easy to see and describe, in others, it lies deeply

hidden and anyone who attempts to unravel it is quickly accused of

advocating `conspiracy theories'.

 

The campaign to de-construct the neurological illness ME, to

ridicule its sufferers and, in the process, to redefine a growing body

of `mentally ill' subjects, began in the mid eighties. The principal

character in the British campaign has been Professor Simon Wessely.

Over time, however, the `psychiatric lobby' has gathered new adherents

and a large, increasingly organised body of combatants.

 

The psychiatric lobby is now marked by its financial power – over

11 million being funnelled into the network of clinical centres and

funding provided by the Medical Research Council (MRC) to carry out

the PACE and FINE trials; its roots in major medical research

institutions like the MRC and increasingly its links to corporate

lobby groups funded especially by the pharmaceutical companies.

 

The patient, or `sufferer' group which has been forged simply by

its opposition to the psychiatric lobby, has inevitably consisted of

disparate groups and individuals. Inevitably, because unlike the

psychiatric lobby, this grouping has no common ideological purpose nor

does it have a hegemonous leadership. Mainly, as well, this group is

composed of people who are ill or their carers, circumstances which

leave little room for organised campaigning. The only two defining

criteria of this group are, first, they seek effective treatments for

ME and second, they have pressed the research community to carry out

physical research in order to find the organic causes of ME.

 

DELUSIONAL 2.jpg

 

Delusional Emma Holister

 

While the psychiatric lobby is well organised, powerful and

educated to a unified purpose, sufferers, patients and their families

lack political, organisational cohesion. The inability of this

`community' to form a united political campaign has meant that they

have faced a consistent series of defeats, and while the `psychiatric'

lobby has become stronger, the campaign of sufferers, patients and

their families have lost ground, broken off on the edges and become

divided within itself.

 

 

Objectives

 

What is inevitably confusing about the psychiatric lobby, what

makes them difficult to stand firmly against, is their apparent lack

of a reasoned and ultimate objective. It is, of course, useful to

define ultimate objectives in order to organise opposition strategies.

While an effective campaign can be waged on a day to day basis, it is

an understanding of the final objective of the psychiatric lobby which

should in principle define the political movement against them.

Without any understanding of the lobby's objective, we are left to

weigh up each new assault, each new gambit, on the apparent sincerity

of its proposer.

 

Before going on to look at the present strategies being employed

by the psychiatric lobby, I would like to try and define their

long-term objectives.

 

With New Labour, the biotech industry and the pharmaceutical

companies have planned a far-reaching programme of `drug' research.

They are committed to being world leaders by the year 2015 in the

production of biotech and genetically engineered `person altering'

substances. These substances will not be medicines in the sense that

we recognise them presently and the purpose of many of them will not

be to treat illness. In fact, it might be the case that we have come

to the end of the period of human pharmaceutical drug use, at least on

the scale we have witnessed it over the last fifty years.

 

These new patented substances will be used primarily to change

people. Apart from a number of physical changes, there are many mental

outlooks which might be affected: a person might be made happier, more

serious, more creative, to have, for example, a better memory, or to

be more empathetic, more attractive to the opposite sex.

 

Presently, the pharmaceutical industry, which has recently begun

to join with the biotech industry, considers that it suffers

over-regulation. Limitation on animal experiments and strictures on

human drug trials are increasingly considered an obstacle to profit.

The big problems, however, lie in the future: Will these corporations

be able to convince governments - in the face of anti-vivisection

protests – that the rules for animal testing can be stretched to

include mood-altering compounds which are not specifically

`treatments'? Even if this problem is resolved, in second stage

testing, corporations are going to need considerable access to human

volunteers, particularly those with certain psychological portraits.

 

I can see no other reason why the North American State has

embarked upon a mental health audit of the whole population, nor why

British psychiatrists should want to push half a million adults and

children through a network of clinical centres which evaluate their

psychological status.

 

 

The Ongoing Battle

 

With this possible long-term objective in mind, we can return to

reviewing the psychiatric lobby's present strategies. The battle

between the psychiatric lobby and the vulnerable patients and

sufferers campaign has always been a massively uneven battle. Fairly

recently, however, it has taken a major turn in favour of the

psychiatric lobby.

 

The report of the Chief Medical Officer in 2003, ultimately only

strengthened the hand of the psychiatric lobby, awarding them even

greater funding to carry their case forward. However, because in some

general respects this Report gave powerless succour to patients and

patients groups who had been arguing that the origins of ME were

organic, the report angered the psychiatric lobby. Weeks before the

end of deliberations, in an infantile gesture, the psychiatric

participants resigned en masse.

 

Since the end of the CMO's Report, the psychiatric lobby strategy

might be said to have four prongs.

 

 

The PRIME Project and PACE

 

The PRIME Project appears to be giving the kind of time and

attention to ME sufferers which many of them have always wanted.

However, despite its protestations that it is evaluating the kinds of

treatments best used with ME, the project is nothing more than a

softening-up project, working to shovel sufferers into the PACE trials

and its network of clinical centres.

 

The PRIME Project is firmly rooted in the camp of the psychiatric

lobby and has no intentions of either raising the funds for or

designing any programmes of organic research into the causes of ME.

The complete exposure of this strategy is written up on the One Click

site in The One Click Story – The Underbelly of ME/CFS Politics Revealed.

 

 

Assault on the Political Opposition

 

The third strand of the strategy has involved an all-out assault

upon the One Click campaign, the only patient advocacy group opposed

to the psychiatric lobby which has a political perspective. This

assault has been varied in its implementation, including, character

assassination, threatening letters, police intervention, arrests, the

interference with telephone and computer services and, in the case of

[One Click founder] Jane Bryant, the confiscation of her computer. It

has been singular, though, in its objective, to shut down the

principal opposition to the psychiatric lobby. This strand of the

strategy is also written up on the One Click site.

 

 

The `Independent' Inquiry

 

The fourth strand of the strategy, which has emerged over the last

six months, has exhibited itself in Dr Ian Gibson MP's `Independent

Inquiry', which was set up to examine other than psychiatric causes of ME.

 

The emergence of the `Independent ` Inquiry manifests one of the

greatest differences between the two lobbies involved in this ongoing

battle being fought over ME sufferers. The philosophy of those who are

asking for serious scientific biological research into the causes of

ME, can be reported simply and without embellishment. For twenty years

now, they have wanted no more than any other patient group in Britain:

to raise the issue of, and the funding for scientific research into

the cause and treatment of their condition.

 

With respect to those who maintain that ME is first and foremost a

psychiatric condition, their philosophy, its campaign and their

strategies have been anything but straightforward. Baroque in its

intrigue, infinite in its dissembling, practised like a card sharp in

deceit, it has resembled nothing less than a psychological operation

constructed by the CIA or some other secret policing instrument. The

campaign has buried itself inside medical research like an engorged

maggot; at every turn, new money comes to hand, more mercenary

researchers rush to its aid. With each turn of the ratchet in its

offensive, new sponsors from the corporate world emerge, new velvet

gloves hiding iron fists, new words of reconciliation which conceal

venom and forked tongues.

 

Because the patient community is unable to adopt a cohesive

political line, they get duped every time the psychiatric lobby hides

its stick behind a large carrot. In the case of the phantom

`Independent' Inquiry, Dr Ian Gibson New Labour MP for Norwich North,

approached Kevin Short and Professor Malcolm Hooper. After a

discussion Gibson went to the nearest phone box and having changed

into his familiar red and blue suit, flew out exclaiming; `It's about

time something was done, I will set up an Independent Inquiry'. Within

days of Gibson's offer, Short was energetically digging another hole

for ME groups to bury themselves in.

 

Neither Kevin Short nor Professor Hooper, or for that matter a

number of others who quickly tendered evidence to what has turned out

to be an entirely bogus offer, seem to have given Gibson's offer a

moment's political reflection. It was as if the words `Independent

Inquiry' mesmerised the listeners and they immediately suspended their

political judgement. `I'm an MP', said Gibson, `trust me'.

 

Had either Professor Hooper or Kevin Short reflected for a moment

on Gibson and his offer, they would have found cause to be concerned.

Before he became an MP, in 1997, Gibson was Dean of the School of

Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA). East

Anglia was the base, until the mid nineties, of Fisons, the

agricultural chemical company. Funding from the company helped shape

research at the UEA, more so when Fisons was bought up by

Rhone-Poulenc in 1996. In 1999, Rhone-Poulenc joined with Hoeschst

Marion Roussel to form Aventis. UEA has had a funding input from all

these companies and, in 2003, it was in the top twelve Universities

receiving funds from the BBSRC, the bio-tech quango which dispenses

massive funding – some of it from the coffers of the Sainsbury family.

Gibson himself has declared funding received from Rhone-Poulenc for

taking part in scientific meetings.

 

Up until last year, Gibson was the Chair of the All Party Science

and Technology Committee (APSTC), the watchdog committee which

oversees science policy in the Commons for the Science Ministry which

is situated within the Department of Trade and Industry (Dti). The

APSTC is funded in part by Astra Zeneca, the Dti and bioscience companies.

 

Together with Dr Des Turner, Tony Wright and Dr Richard Taylor –

also a member of the Associate Parliamentary Group on Health, set up

by the pharmaceutical lobby group Networking for Industry – Gibson is

a member of the All Party Group on Cancer, which is heavily funded by

all the leading Big Pharma names, including Novartis, Pfizer Lilly and

Merk. He is also a member of the All Party Group on Pesticides and

Organophosphates, which, until they became more focussed on

bio-engineering, were staple product of Fisons and Rhone-Poulenc.

 

Gibson is a leading member of the British Association for the

Advancement of Science, now called simply the BA, which in the early

nineties played a considerable role in promoting the `quackbusting'

Campaign Against Health Fraud. Gibson sits on the editorial committee

of the BA's magazine, Science and Public Affairs, the magazine is

again a public arbiter of government science policy and Gibson shares

his editorial role with personnel from the Royal Society of Spin, The

Financial Times, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology

(POST) – the science policy-making centre of government, and the

Wellcome Trust.

 

Involvement in the higher echelons of corporate science and

government has brought Gibson into contact with the new generation of

science lobby groups. Sense About Science – funded by the ABPI and

various chemical and pharmaceutical interests; The Institute of Ideas

– funded by Pfizer and the Science Media Centre, also funded by the

ABPI and a variety of powerful corporations. These lobby groups work

in partnership with New Labour, POST and the Dti.

 

Although they profess a focus on science, these groups, are

actually involved in corporate PR and spin. They are linked in North

America to right-wing libertarian groups heavily involved in

`quackbusting', campaigning rabidly against alternative medicine,

environmentalists and patient advocacy groups. In Britain, they have

been involved, in partnership with the Royal Society and the Royal

Institution, in pushing corporate interests in Genetically Modified

crops and pharmaceuticals. In 2004, Science in Society, the magazine

of the Institute of Science in Society, one of the most independent

and radical science campaigning groups, informed its readers of the

collusion between Professor Derek Burke a leading member of Sense

About Science, and Dr Ian Gibson, in defending GM crops on the grounds

that they were perfectly safe for human health.

 

This interest in corporate science is, of course, quite natural

for a man who has been an academic scientist prior to entering the

Commons. For ME sufferers, however, Gibson's involvement with the

various groups above must sound alarm bells. As I explained in Brave

New World of Zero Risk, the lobby groups which are presently spinning

news on behalf of corporate interests and New Labour are the joined up

version of the quackbuster group HealthWatch (in fact, members and ex

- members of HealthWatch actually write unattributed copy for members

of these lobby groups).

 

One of the prominent founding members of HealthWatch was Simon -

now Professor - Wessely. Wessely is now a senior member of the Science

Advisory Panel for the Science and Media Centre, a member of the US

American Council on Science and Health advisory panel, a leading

member of the R,RSA, an obscure group inside the Health Protection

Agency, set up to spin all public health threats, and he is still

deeply involved in the corporate manipulation of ME information. Yet

another prominent member of this new generation of Lobby organisations

is Michael Fitzpatrick, an East London GP who has written in purple

prose about false beliefs held by people who claim that they have the

physical symptoms of ME.

 

The fact that the `Independent Inquiry' into the skewing of

government policy on ME towards the psychiatric lobby, which Gibson

promised, turns out to be neither an `Inquiry' nor `Independent', is

par for the course. Before even the composition or the personnel of

the Inquiry had been announced, the Independent Inquiry suddenly

metamorphosed into a `Scientific Group on ME' situated in the offices

of Tony Wright MP, the last Chair of the Parliamentary group on ME.

 

So, after twenty years of getting by on a wing and a prayer,

without the slightest evidence to support their bizarre belief that ME

is a psychiatric condition, the psychiatric lobby has wised up. How

much better it would be for the psychiatric lobby to colonise the area

of physical scientific research into ME. Of course, there is a vast

difference between gathering information about scientific research

into ME – little of which has been done for obvious reasons – and

supporting this same research.

 

We have a good example of how the corporate science lobby groups

deal with scientific research in the position that Dr Fitzpatrick and

others have taken on Dr Andrew Wakefield's research. There is only one

genuinely scientific resolution to an argument within scientific

research, that is, to independently replicate research and compare

results. Instead of doing this, the `science lobby', supported by

government and pharmaceutical companies, used research reviews like

the recent Cochrane Review, which compared studies focussed either on

MMR or Autism, to discredit Wakefield.

 

Inevitably, there has been precious little physical scientific

investigation into ME, in Britain. The reason for this is obvious; all

the money and the power is held by the psychiatric lobby the posturing

of which, over ME suits the government and the corporations. Once

again, with the declaration of an `Independent' Inquiry, the ME

community has been thrown into confusion by a honeymoon offer from

their detractors. The singular lack of political analysis amongst some

of the most prominent figures in the ME community, has yet again led

these long-suffering individuals down another blind alley.

 

The conflict between the psychiatric lobby and those who believe

that ME has a physical aetiology is now intractably dominated by

vested interests. The PRIME Project, the `Independent' Inquiry and the

network of clinics set up by the NHS, under the guidance of Professor

Pinching, all constitute major advances by the psychiatric lobby.

Unfortunately, after twenty years of denigration, many ME sufferers

and their carers are still avoiding crucial political questions and

failing to work autonomously towards what should be their two main

objectives.

 

The first, a political objective has to be the organisation of a

far reaching independent and judicial investigation into the

psychiatric lobby and, the second, more practical objective, the

establishment of an `independent' national research fund, which will

be used to establish and conduct research entirely into the physical

causes of ME by medical researchers unaligned to either corporate or

psychiatric interests.

 

There comes a time in all political struggles when accepting the

hand of friendship from a suspected or traditional enemy, or even

entering into a dialogue with them is simply to commit Hara Kiri, in

public without the honour. Until the ME `community' has built a solid

and cohesive movement opposed to the psychiatric and corporate

lobbies, until they begin to close in on either of the two objectives

above, it would appear wise for them to adopt the `precautionary

principle' and maintain a moratorium on listening to or consorting

with anyone who comes bearing gifts or `Independent' Inquiries.

 

Martin J. Walker

8 November 2005

 

Martin Walker's book: Brave New World of Zero Risk Martin Walker

provides the book for free. Your contribution is welcome - it will

help him continue his excellent investigative work.

 

 

 

posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Thursday December 22 2005

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