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| TX: 06.01.2006 - Aluminium and Alzheimer's PRESENTER: JOHN WAITE |
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| Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. WAITE A coroner and a former environment minister have called for more research to be carried out on residents of a North Cornish town who were caught up in the UK's biggest ever water poisoning incident. It was in 1988 that 20 tons of aluminium sulphate were accidentally dumped into the water supply in Camelford and the resulting poisoned water pumped into the homes of some 20,000 people. And now a post-mortem test on one of those residents has revealed abnormally high levels of aluminium in the dead woman's brain. In the 17 years since the incident locals have complained of a range of health problems, including brain damage. Well Janine Jansen is the reporter from BBC South West who's been following the story and she joins us now from our Plymouth studio. Janine, what concerns did local people have following and indeed since the event? JANSEN Well within the first year and a half more than 400 residents reported a variety of symptoms from chest pains, mouth blisters, kidney damage to skin rashes, memory loss and sickness and you say brain damage in recent years. People were told the water was safe but the BBC did their own sample and they tested it independently the day after the incident and the water had 500 times above normal levels of aluminium. WAITE And what was the reaction at the time of the water company and indeed the government? JANSEN Well the water company, which was then called the South West Water Authority, said it was a minor plant breakdown. They said the water was safe but two weeks later it was leaked to the local newspaper that it had been a major pollution incident. Now the first official report by them was issued 40 days later and that was the first time the public had officially been told what had happened. And the chairman of the water company, Keith Court, admitted at a public meeting that there had been a sequence of errors, omissions and under estimations, and they later acknowledged that the public should have been told earlier. Now in 1991 the South West Water Authority was convicted at Exeter Crown Court of supplying water likely to endanger public health and they were fined £10,000 with £25,000 costs. Three years later 148 people won an out of court settlement totalling £400,000. Now as for the government, well Paul Tyler, he's the local MP, he campaigned vociferously for a local public inquiry, he says it was refused by the then Conservative government because the water industry was on the brink of privatisation and they didn't want any uncomfortable publicity. WAITE And what have any official reports concluded so far? JANSEN Well the first government report in 1989 was the Clayton Report. Now that concluded there'd been no long term health effects. Then a second report concluded there could be unforeseen late consequences and this was actually boosted by a report in the British Medical Journal which said that people had suffered considerable damage to their brain function. Now last year, last January, another official draft report said it could find no conclusive link between the poisoning and people's illnesses. But researchers did say that more research was needed in three areas, including the effects of contaminants on neurological health. Now one of the local people who gave evidence to the report committee was environmental consultant Doug Cross. Now he and his wife Carol were living in Camelford at the time of the incident and Carol died in 2004 at the age of 59 and Doug told me how her health went downhill. CROSS I didn't realise there was anything wrong with my wife until about a year or so before she died when she began to show some peculiarities in behaviour and memory problems and so on. And from then there was an extremely rapid decline until just before she died she was unable to do virtually anything and no one seemed to have any idea why she was ill. We weren't really aware that she was going to die until a few days before. JANSEN Now he insisted that a post-mortem examination was carried out on her brain and that it was considered specifically in the light of the Camelford incident and two of the country's leading scientists examined her brain. CROSS The pathologist noticed unusual appearance of the brain tissue and on using a stain to look for things like the tissues which are characteristic of Alzheimer's and so on she found that there was changes in the brain tissue but only next to the blood vessels, there wasn't like in the Alzheimer's you would find it all through the brain, in this case it was only next to the blood vessels. So she then sent the samples of the brain to another chemist who looked at these for aluminium and in certain parts he found very much higher levels of aluminium than you would normally find even in Alzheimer's Disease but in others it was not so severe. The question is whether or not the aluminium caused these obvious changes, we don't know at the moment. But the level of aluminium in parts of my wife's brain is rather similar to what you find in a very extreme form of aluminium poisoning known as dialysis dementia. This is the first time that they've come across anything like these huge aluminium levels in somebody with pre-senile dementia. My wife was not 60 and yet she died of a condition which is much more characteristic of people who are 80 or more. JANSEN Now Dr Chris Exley from Keele University said that he took five different brain samples from Mrs Cross and all of them were contaminated with high levels of aluminium and the highest was almost 20 times the normal amount. The neuropathologist from Oxford is now calling for more research to be carried out on people who drank the water who say they're still suffering ill health. And she wants more post-mortems to be carried out. And of course we're still awaiting the inquest on Mrs Carol Cross. CROSS The coroner has adjourned the inquest for the second time and he tells me that he will not be satisfied until he can say one way or the other whether my wife's condition was something which she would have got anyway, although we wouldn't know why, or whether it is something which is resulting from the exposure in 1988. And there are people in Camelford who are extremely frightened about this and I should say to them that we are not looking at Alzheimer's, what we are looking at possibly is the way in which aluminium may stimulate the development of diseases and conditions much quicker than they would normally occur and they occur at an earlier age in some people. But the number of people who are likely to be affected is going to be very, very small. WAITE Doug Cross. So what happens next Janine? JANSEN Well a third report is underway, this is an independent report, it was initiated by the former environment minister Michael Meacher and local MP Paul Tyler. Now the committee is meeting again later this month and they hope to publish it after that. But in the light of these post-mortem results from Mrs Cross many people, including Michael Meacher, are calling for the report to be adjourned until the inquest and more research has been carried out. WAITE Janine Jansen in Plymouth thank you very much indeed. Listening to her are Dr David Wilkinson, consultant in old age psychiatry at Moorgreen Hospital in Southampton and Dr Chris Exley, reader in bioinorganic chemistry at Keele University in Staffordshire, as you heard there the expert in aluminium who did chemical analysis on Mrs Cross's brain. Dr David Wilkinson first though. Is there a link, do you believe, between aluminium and brain problems like Alzheimer's? WILKINSON Well there has been a lot of research into this connection between aluminium and Alzheimer's Disease over the last 40 years or so and despite that no causal link has actually been demonstrated, as Mr Cross indicated. And the only reports that patients with Alzheimer's Disease had higher levels of aluminium in their brains have pretty much been discounted by later studies. Although there are, as he indicated, no particular causal links there do seem to be some associations it seems between aluminium and the senile plaques we find in Alzheimer's Disease by some researchers. But I think what we have to remember is that aluminium after oxygen and silicon is the next commonest element on the earth and animals have obviously evolved on the earth have evolved to deal with it. I mean we eat something like well up to 15 milligrams of aluminium a day in our diet, a tiny proportion of which comes from the water we drink and of that only about 1% will actually get through the intestine into the blood and it tends to be excreted pretty rapidly after that. And of course we do know that some people eat thousands of times that amount of aluminium when they consume antacids every day. And there has been a lot of epidemiological studies looking at people with antacid exposure and they've been largely negative in terms of any connection with Alzheimer's Disease. So I think there's a lot of doubt as to whether there's any real causal relationship. WAITE Dr Chris Exley, does that doubt appear in your mind? EXLEY Well I guess I have a slightly different perspective to Dr Wilkinson, I mean my interests are purely on aluminium both the fact that it makes up the earth's crust and its chemistry thereof and indeed how it may impact upon human health. And I suppose my opinion is a little different in that I believe that we cannot say for certain whether or not aluminium is involved in a number of different neuro-degenerative diseases. We recently had a book published in this area where many scientists from all over the world contributed to this and our conclusion was that there is a link and that link remains and there is no doubt in fact that there is either an unusual distribution of aluminium in the brain of Alzheimer patients but often more aluminium in the brain of Alzheimer patients. That's very recent work in the last few months. WAITE And even more recent work, your work on Mrs Cross's brain, do you believe that the aluminium that you found there was somehow got there because of what happened in Camelford with that aluminium dumping incident? EXLEY Well as Mr Cross pointed out very well the amount of aluminium that was found there could not have got there by chance, we're talking about values as Doug Cross said which are perhaps 20 times the amount that are hopefully in the brain of you and I. So this is not adventitious, something has happened to allow this aluminium to accumulate. What we found was that it was accumulating in the affected tissues not over the entire brain. So it is specific to the affected regions of the brain. Now that's as far as we can go at this stage, we cannot say that aluminium caused the neuropathology but we cannot say that aluminium has not caused that neuropathology. WAITE This is all even more puzzling Dr David Wilkinson because aluminium is actually often added to water supplies isn't it, to purify water? WILKINSON Oh yes because it's insoluble essentially, I mean aluminium sulphate tends to be put in the water to flocculate any particles in the water and then it gets filtered out. WAITE And is there any evidence to suggest David that in the areas that use aluminium in their water there's a higher incidence of dementia? WILKINSON No there isn't in fact. I mean there were some early epidemiological studies which were published about 15 years ago which seemed to suggest there was but the same researchers from the MRC unit in Southampton looked again much more carefully at those different areas in the country with different levels of aluminium and found there was absolutely no connection between aluminium or silicate and the development of Alzheimer's Disease. So I don't think aluminium in the water's an issue. I think the fact that we get aluminium in damaged parts of the brain isn't, as Chris is saying, doesn't mean the aluminium caused it, it may mean that the aluminium's collected there because the brain is damaged. I think that is something that happens. WAITE I've got to leave the final word to Chris Exley. In this ongoing story Chris to find out what are the possible consequences of what happened at Camelford, what happens next? EXLEY Well what we hope will happen next is that the old rallying cry of scientists will be taken heed of and that is that more research is needed. What I think is the case this time is that the rallying cry actually has some weight because in the United Kingdom there has been no research on aluminium and Alzheimer's Disease either through the government via the research councils, for example, or the large medical charities such as the Wellcome Trust and there's not been any research at all for the last 10 to 15 years, not a single penny. We don't know why because there are plenty of people, myself included, who would like to research in this area. I think that the latest observations with respect to Mrs Cross's brain at Camelford along with some other interesting data which is coming out in the new year is enough for us to look again at this and to get some money, get some research, so we can definitely say next time we have this discussion look is aluminium involved, is it causative or is it simply adventitious. WAITE Okay, we have to leave it there. Drs Chris Exley and David Wilkinson thank you both. Back to the You and Yours homepage The BBC is not responsible for external websites |
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