Retired civil servant and sheep farmer Brenda Sutcliffe has recently published a fascinating 24-page collection of papers revealing what she believes is ‘the link between organophosphate poisoning and ill health in farmers, soldiers and the general public’. Entitled ‘CAUSE & EFFECT The Search for the Truth’ it can be ordered from her at just £1 plus a first class stamp.
Brenda and her husband have been farming sheep for over fifty years in the hills of Lancashire. Their 70-acre farm just outside Littleborough is home to around 200 sheep. “In the early 1990s we were looking to diversify by organising school visits to the farm but our illnesses meant we couldn’t” she says.
The booklet she has produced is the result of painstaking attempts to get to the truth behind, for example, why so many shepherds have committed suicide over the last ten years. Her research started after Brenda, her husband and four others became desperately ill after they were forced, like thousands of others then and today, to compulsory use organophosphate sheep dips. Local Environmental Health Officers supervised the dipping. Later when they had partially recovered Brenda persuaded her local councillor to call a meeting of other local farmers to find out if there were other victims in the area. The local authority refused to send a representative or to recognise that people were becoming ill after they had dipped their sheep. They could offer Brenda no ideas for treatment and according to her they “wouldn’t even acknowledge our problems.”
“I was angry” Brenda says, adding quickly “which I am generally not by nature.” Until 1992 she would happily admit that she had no “previous campaigning experience or activity in politics” although she had always been a member of her union, the CPSA. “I was forced to fight,” she says.
Blood tests revealed that she and her family were suffering from organophosphate [OPs] sheep dip poisoning. However when she tried to contact numerous people in various local and national Government departments she found, once again, that no one appeared to be interested or concerned and so “I decided to make my own enquiries” she says.
She began by obtaining
as much scientific information on OP compounds used as sheep dip as she could.
These included Diazinon, Propetamphos, Chlorfenvinphos and later Crufomate,
which is used for the treatment of warble fly infestations
in cattle. Unable to obtain the information she required from bodies such as
the Health and Safety Executive, the Department of Health and The National Office
of Animal Health [NOAH] she was forced to look abroad and says; “I don’t
know what I would have done without The Environment Protection Agency in Washington
in the United States of America.”
She later expanded her
work to examine all the OPs that were used on soldiers in the first Gulf War.
What she uncovered, and bear in mind that none of this information in the form
of Health and Data sheets had been given to or explained by Environmental Health
Officers to those dipping sheep was that all OPs were cholinesterase inhibitors,
or as Brenda Sutcliffe explains “this means
that the damage caused is cumulative” and “that research using laboratory
animals has showed that most are carcinogenic and are responsible for malformations
in up to and including the third generation of offspring.” “Yet
we were dipping sheep in this” and “we nearly died as a result”
and “we are not the only farmers effected.”
She discovered that workers producing OP in a factory who subsequently become unfit for work can get compensation and are entitled to claim industrial injury benefit but farmers forced into early retirement, or worse, can’t as the benefit isn’t payable to self-employed farmers who have been issued with the guidelines.
Organophosphates were originally described as nerve gases and as Brenda and her husbands’ cases showed they are extremely efficient at destroying certain enzymes in the blood of all warm-blooded animals, including humans.
When their blood samples were sent by their doctor to be tested at Guys Hospital in London one of the enzymes tested was cholinesterase, this governs messages getting to and from the brain. The expected norm is between 40 and 80 units per 100 mls of blood. Brenda’s was 8.25 and her husbands 8.75. The enzyme does try to correct the imbalance over time, but doctors informed her that it was unlikely to ever reach its starting point.
It was only when she did eventually obtain hazard sheets on a range of OPs that she began to understand the potential great dangers they posed, and still do, for anyone working with or using them. For example, the Crufomate hazard sheet she was forced to obtain from the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services, the result of the manufacturers here in Britain refusing to publish it, revealed that ‘crufomate can affect you when breathed in and by passing through the skin.’ This was poured down the backs of cattle.
“Yet farmers are not told or issued with protective clothing”, she rightly complains. [1]
The Crufomate hazard sheet states that short-term effects can cause ‘rapid, fatal OP poisoning with headache, sweating, nausea’ and long-term effects ‘may cause personality changes, including depression, anxiety or irritability’. The hazard sheet for Coumpahos states that ‘effects reported in workers repeatedly exposed include impaired memory and oncentration…..nightmares, confusion……’
Fortunately when they visited
their local doctor he was alert enough to spot that these symptoms were the
result of poisoning and hence the blood tests. “We were lucky,”
confirms Brenda; “other shepherds haven’t been” and “I
am convinced that the high level of suicides recorded in the last ten years
is due to OP poisoning.” In the last 10 years around 1,000 shepherds are
recorded as
having killed themselves, which the media has recorded as the result of ‘financial
pressures.’ Brenda disputes this.
When Brenda’s attempts to find out more about OPs became known by others it wasn’t long before other farmers started to contact her. A telephone book she has kept for the last few years is littered with the names and contact details of people who have phoned her, reported problems and asked for her advice.
She is now considering
holding a public event and inviting all of them to attend, where together they
can record their experiences and discuss how to pressurise the Government and
various agencies into taking seriously their problems. Defra have stated that
they don’t even know how many people have been poisoned and a Government
Committee in 1999 concluded that there was not
enough evidence to prove OP sheep dip had caused serious medical problems to
people exposed to it. This was a view disputed by Liberal Democrat MP Paul Tyler,
chair of the All Party OP group who said at the time “the people who have
been studied [by the committee] carefully are those who are still working and
who are very fit. The people who are not fit, who have had to give up work because
of exposure to OPs, have not been properly studied.” He called for a total
ban on the use of OP sheep dipping.
Meanwhile her research has taken her onto questioning whether the BSE epidemic that led to nv CJD in humans was, in fact, the result of scrapie-infected sheep brains in bone meal being consumed by cattle arguing that a possible cause for CJD deaths may instead lie with OP insecticides or Pyrethroids still being used on children’s heads.
The evidence on this is inconclusive. However what cannot be ignored is that there is a lack of hard evidence on what caused BSE in cattle with only this week DEFRA announcing that it has ‘appointed an independent expert to review its work on BSE cases in animals that were born after August 1st 1996.’ [1] This was the date when feeding mammalian meat and bone meal to cattle was banned. Since then over 100 cattle born after this date have been confirmed with BSE. Brenda Sutcliffe is urging the appointed expert, William Hill of the University of Edinburgh “to read my paper” and is sending him a copy for his consideration.
Meanwhile in a surprising development, every paramedic in Lincolnshire was recently [November 2004] issued with a ‘pen’ which when activated releases a serum that combats the effects of organophosphate poisoning. [3] Brenda attributes this move to “health officials trying to be prepared in case of a chemical attack in the UK” but argues that this decision demonstrates that her concerns about shepherds having been poisoned by OP’s is warranted.
Brenda Sutcliffe’s small booklet is well worth obtaining at £1.30 pence, larger donations welcome and can be ordered from her at Sheep Bank Farm, Littleborough, Lancashire OL15 0LH.
1. The full scientific
details on the International Chemical Safety Cards are available on http://turva.me.tut.fi/iloa-gri/732116.htm
2. The end is in sight DEFRA to scrap 30-month scheme J.Riley and
A Watts from Farmers Weekly 26/11/2004
3. Lincolnshire Echo - December 12th
2004
Research undertaken by Mark Purdey at www.markpurdey.com should not be missed as it reveals the origins of BSE and a whole lot more….
It is pleasing to report that the above article has proven to be a big help
to Brenda Sutcliffe in her struggle to establish a link between Organophosphate
poisoning and ill health in farmers, soldiers and the general public.
The article was re-produced in ‘The Morning Star’ and the TGWU’s ‘Landworker’ magazine for Agricultural Workers, bringing with it dozens of requests for the ‘Cause and Effect’ booklet and bringing Brenda’s arguments to thousands of previously uninformed people. A subsequent article later appeared in the Public and Civil Servants trade union magazine.
After the British Library agreed to take copies of ‘Cause and Effect’ further publicity was generated, and copies have now been lodged in the House of Commons Library.
The effect of all this is that there is an increasing willingness by the media to listen to some of the arguments being outlined. At this moment they are unwilling to commit to supporting what is being argued, but perhaps in time that may come. [Sadly, of course a good number of additional shepherd’s and others will have died by then]
Meanwhile a long awaited and expensive report into the possible effects of exposure to Organophosphates in sheep dip failed to prove conclusive. The Survey of Health and Pesticide Exposure did record a perceived link between high exposure to the chemicals and ill-health.
However the study by Tony Fletcher, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that limitations in the way the study was set up meant it could not draw firm conclusions. £336,000 of public money was spent.
What this appears to mean is that over a 1/3rd of a million of ratepayers money was spent on a study that from the beginning could not establish if a link between OP exposure and ill-health existed, even though that was what the study was about. No-one in authority appears to mind that such a large sum was spent on a pointless exercise.
If the above wasn’t madness enough the Veterinary Medicines Directorate [VMD] also defended its’ own piece of lunacy in a letter to Brenda Sutcliffe on June 28th 2005. She had written to them to enquire how it was possible to follow instructions and prevent sheep from inhaling or drinking any of the dip wash during the general pandemonium which accompanies any dipping of sheep.
Unable to provide an answer the VMD merely repeated their earlier instructions that include ‘keep the sheep moving in the bath and plunge the head down at least once’ in the sheep dip.
I am sure all shepherds can be certain that if they give the sheep a good talking to before they are dipped the sheep will remember not to open their mouths when their heads are plunged into the sheep dip.
Further reading: