Camelford drinking water inquest & Wessely

[Min]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...tals-were-leaked-into-mains-water-supply.html

Driver recalls moment poisonous metals were leaked into mains water supply

A delivery driver dumped 20 tonnes of aluminium sulphate into the wrong tank at a water treatment works, causing Britain's worst water poisoning contamination, an inquest heard.

...Residents were subjected to levels of aluminium around 500 to 3,000 times over the acceptable European Union limits and hundreds said they subsequently became ill.
The water was so polluted in the first few hours that customers reported hairs sticking to their body like superglue as they got out of the bath.

Customers flooded the South West Water Authority switchboard but were told the water was safe to drink and some were even advised to boil it, which increased the levels of aluminium still further.

...Carole Cross, 59, who lived in Camelford at the time of the poisoning in 1988, died 16 years later.
Large amounts of aluminium were found in her brain after her death in 2004...

yet Simon Wessely and Anthony David wrote, in their paper 'The Legend of Camelford':

" We suggest that the most likely explanation of the Camelford findings is that the perception of normal and benign somatic symptoms (physical or mental) by both subjects and health professionals was heightened and subsequently attributed to an external, physical cause, such as poisoning ...

... there can be no doubting the substantial effect that the prospect of litigation has on distress, particularly of the ill-defined sort present at Camelford...

... ... Unlike Cornwall, the doctors in Shetland were lucky not to have had to deal with the irresponsible
reporting which so inflamed passions in Camelford. These and other variables which turn an incident into a legend, merit serious study. Future investigations of
environmental incidents should recall that social and cultural factors are as important as medical ones."

Somatoform disorder is a mental disorder characterized by physical symptoms that mimic physical disease or injury for which there is no identifiable physical cause - Wikipedia

Aluminium around 500 to 3,000 times over the acceptable European Union limits in drinking water is no identifiable physical cause?

 

[Enid]

Wrong again Mr Wesseley. Will he ever learn !

 

[helsbells]

I remember this - it was truly awful. I am not being glib when I say this but I really don't think SW himself is all there ie not shuffling a full deck himself.

 

[Trooper]

Simon 'Somatoform' Wessely.

 

[eric_s]

Why is this man everywhere?? He's not a doctor of somatic medicine (correct term?), neither a microbiologist or chemicist. Yet he is everywhere, no matter what the subject is. That's quite wierd. You have to get rid of this (i mean his influence only...). And every time he seems to come up with the same explanation for things.

 

[Athene]

I have no doubt that one of the medical insurance companies to which Mr. Wessely is a paid advisor received a great many insurance claims relating to this ecological disaster. Clearly, the only reason he would deny the facts in this blatant way would be to justify refusing payouts.
People always act rationally, you just have to look for their MOTIVATION.

 

[Athene]

And a pattern emerges...

It seems we PWCs are just one of the many groups of ill people whom Mr. Simon "Somatoform" Wessely denies insurance or medical help.

The more you search for info on UNUM, the more you realise that Simon Wessely devotes his life to saving them money by denying ANY illness exists and calling everything somatoform, despite the fact that this freqently violates world health organisation conventions.

Here's the bigger picture regarding UNUM:

1. This website describes the corruption of UMUN and the way they try to deny paying out ANY medical claims by denying any illness. They have been investigated and exposed as ruthlessly corrupt already:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...insurance+claim+unum&cd=1&hl=it&ct=clnk&gl=it

2. Sufferers of problems relating to massive electromagnetic pollution have been accused of psychological illness despite medical proof to the contrary, presented clearly in a Panorama documentary: (For those not from the UK, if it's on Panorama on the BBC, you really can trust it.)
14. Psychiatric factors
Although EHS was first described in medical journals in 1932 and there were many occupational studies on its nature and prevalence in the 1960s in Poland and the USSR, a psychological aetiology for EHS in the general population became common only in the 1990s. This was when mobile phone companies and their insurers were worried about health claims and wanted to allay anxiety about increasing reports of adverse health effects.
A similar attempt at a psychological explanation occurred with ME/CFS, but it was against the WHO classification of G93.3. In fact Professor Wessely of Kings College Institute of Psychiatry has websites dedicated to him and his views on the Camelford water poisoning, autism and the Gulf War Syndrome as well as ME. Some websites state that he was an advisor to the Science and Media Centre, sponsored by the Wi-Fi Alliance and the Mobile Operators Association, in 2009 and the NRPB/HPA Radiation, Risk and Society Advisory Group in 2001, and was allegedly associated with the UNUM insurance company.
A psychiatric aetiology appeals to governments and insurers because it is said that they may then refuse claims from people suffering supposedly psychiatric as opposed to organic illnesses.
It also is said to appeal to drug companies and boosts the role of psychiatrists, often through CBT. In 1993 Professor Kleinman from the US apparently predicted that in 10 years time the central issues in the CFS field would be social rather than medical or scientific, partly driven by the economics and funding of the disability systems in various countries (S.1528, in FD23/4553/1 [some other parts were closed in 2008 until 2071], UK National Archives). In fact the opposite seems to have happened, and now ME is being studied as an organic illness linked in some groups with retroviruses like XMRV, just as MS, rheumatoid arthritis, polio, AIDS, stomach ulcers and diabetes apparently all started as psychiatric illnesses but are now more often regarded as organic.
15. Sensitisation factors
Professor Wessely has elsewhere described possible ES symptoms from WiFi as fatigue and malaise (When and Why do Doctors Collude with Patients? published as part of the UNUM Insurance Companys chief medical officers report of 2007
Link here:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...insurance+claim+unum&cd=2&hl=it&ct=clnk&gl=it

 

[*GG*]

Why is this man everywhere?? He's not a doctor of somatic medicine (correct term?), neither a microbiologist or chemicist. Yet he is everywhere, no matter what the subject is. That's quite wierd. You have to get rid of this (i mean his influence only...). And every time he seems to come up with the same explanation for things.

Psychiatrist do go to medical school, so they should have some background in Microbiology etc, NO?

GG

PS Also, I believe people, in the US at least, can get disability for Depression, assuming it is severe enough. I believe that is why some/all (good) disability lawyers say to mention the mental aspects of your illness, that way they have something to fall back on, say if you are denied for Fibro or ME/CFIDS/CFS. I am talking about our Social Security, I would imagine that other disability policies would be different?

 

[me_is_realist]

Moderator: Post inappropriate to the tenor of this forum

 

[me_is_realist]

Moderator: Post inappropriate to the tenor of this forum

Moderator: Modification innapropriate to me

 

[Min]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-11720343

Camelford water contamination: 'poisoning ignored'

A scientist has described the Camelford water contamination as a "mass poisoning of 20,000 people that was ignored for 22 years".

 

[Mark]

Good link Min, thanks for keeping us updated with this news.

The Camelford poisoning happened in July 1988 when a relief delivery driver accidentally added aluminium sulphate, used to treat cloudy water, to the wrong tank at the Lowermoor works.


That night the SWWA was inundated with about 900 complaints about dirty, foul-tasting water. But no warnings about what had happened were given to the public for another three weeks.


Local residents reported suffering health problems, including stomach cramps, rashes, diarrhoea, mouth ulcers, aching joints and some even said their hair had turned green from copper residues.



Last week the SWWA's former chairman and chief executive Keith Court said the firm had not wanted to create "undue alarm" by telling people in the north Cornwall area what had happened.

And there you have it. Picked straight from Wessely's report: it's really not a good idea to tell people when you've just poisoned them, because it would only worry them.

And as Wessely oh-so-helpfully explains, there's no point investigating the long-term effects of poisoning them once they know you've poisoned them, because any massive increase in alzheimer's you might happen to find might just be due to the stress they feel about having been poisoned.

And the desire to not discuss all this in the media, and not to re-open any inquiries, is of course entirely motivated out of concern for the poor residents who are asking for inquiries, who might get stressed out by those inquiries.

I do find that a little reading about the Camelford poisoning, and Wessely's role in the reports, is very valuable for the ME/CFS patient who is unsure about Wessely and what his wider role is. When you put what he said about Camelford together with the rest of his career as a denialist of anything that might end up in litigation against government or industry, it really does make you wonder why he's so interested in ME...and GWI too (where he helpfully concluded that we will probably never know what caused it...).

And it might also help explain the popularity of conspiracy theories to those frustrated by people who indulge in them - because when the only thing you know for sure is that you can't trust the authorities not to poison you and then lie about it and then refuse to investigate the effects of the poisoning for a couple of decades, where do you go from there? Do you start to wonder what other poisonings we just never found out about because the water didn't taste funny? I certainly do...

The whole thing is one big smoking gun - with Wessely's fingerprints all over it.

 

[Otis]

@gg

Employer-based disability plans frequently drop coverage after a period of time (perhaps18-36 months) for psychiatric illness contributing to your disability. This means that secondary depression falls into a gray area in these policies for long term illness. So a psychiatric illness can help in SSDI cases and hurt in others. Great system we have.

 

[pictureofhealth]

V nice piece of writing Mark.

 

[*GG*]

@gg

Employer-based disability plans frequently drop coverage after a period of time (perhaps18-36 months) for psychiatric illness contributing to your disability. This means that secondary depression falls into a gray area in these policies for long term illness. So a psychiatric illness can help in SSDI cases and hurt in others. Great system we have.

Ah yes, I believe I read that in my UNUM policy!

 

[Leitwolf]

Some answers for those interested

Maybe I can provide some answers on what appears inexplicable otherwise. I studied economics and I never stopped researching some burning questions.

The inconvenient truth is our countries are basically broke. It is far worse than you could tell from the figures promoted. Our economies have been on the decline for decades now, which has only been countered by always fancier statistical beef-ups. This is a process that reaches back to the oil crisis in the mid 70ies.

To give one example: today statistics calculate “imputed rents” into the GDP, where they make up roughly 5%. These are rents that home owners would have to pay hypotheticaly if they were not the owners. This is just one trick among others to expand official GDP figures as well as growth. Thus not only the basic economic figures look better, but also all the ratios concerning government politics. As a result, the average tax burden is lowered just as public debt as a percentage of GDP.

You may get a rough estimate on how bad the situation is, if you look at VAT receipts in relation to the official GDP. Let me give you the example of Austria. In 1973 the VAT tax rate was 8%/16% and that gave the government 3.6 billion Euros, or 9.12% of the GDP back then. In 2008 the tax rate was 10%/20% (+25% over the tax rate in 1973), giving 21.85 bn Euros or 7.72% of the GDP. So, although the tax rate increased by 25%, the actual income from this tax fell by 15%. Why is that? Well, because statistical tricks will obviously fail to produce real output and thus real taxes. If we add up the figures we stare at a hole that amounts to roughly 35-40% of our economic output, and we wonder where it is gone. This phenomenon can be observed in a lot of countries, but not all. Switzerland for instance never felt the need to fake its figures. During the oil crisis of the 70ies their GDP fell by a staggering 7.3% (1975) and 1.4% (1976) respectively, and it took them almost 10 years to recover from that. We may assume that other European countries did hardly better, they just would not admit it.

Why is that important in the context of CFS? Well, this dark secret dominates politics on every agenda. It is the reason why our governments are chronically short of money, why they have to run one reform after another, and why they would rather desert CFS patients than risk more costs. You might argue that successful treatment would actually save money and raise income, but this remains uncertain and our officials are really panicking over their budgets. That is also the reason why helping out CFS patients is quite a little problem in the oil rich country of Norway.

You might consider this information also with respect to the heavily promoted global warming. Just incidentally those measures meant to save our planet could be also be those to save our governments.

 

[Athene]

Hi Leitwolf,

This is all interesting and very true, but the real criminals here are the insurance companies, especially Wessley's protege Unum.

Unlike our governments, Unum is far from being bankrupt or even in financial difficulty. In 2009 they reported an annual profit of US$852.6 million. Their income from insurance premiums that year was 7,475.5 million dollars and they paid out about a tenth of this, 793.3 million dollars, in compensation to customers.

No doubt they could easily have paid out a little more to the ill people? The ones who have been paying their insurance premiums regularly and are now incapacitated with ME or other illnesses?

If anyone wants to get angry in more detail, the link to Unum's accounts online is here
http://thomson.mobular.net/thomson/7/3081/4201/

 

[Min]

When the end came – suddenly, silently but not entirely unexpectedly – it was probably a blessing for Richard Gibbons.

He had spent more than 20 years racked with pain, mentally confused, agitated and obsessed by the very thing which he feared would kill him, and almost certainly did.

His decline and early death at 60 was a tragedy for the Gibbons family. The rapid onset of dementia had left him, in the words of his daughter, ‘a shell of a man’.

Yet while Mr Gibbons’s mental confusion and associated ill health were obvious to those he met, there was another silent factor in his sickness, a factor with serious repercussions for thousands in and around the small, picturesque Cornish town of Camelford.

Just a few weeks ago, it was established beyond doubt that the former businessman died with abnormally high levels of aluminium in his brain, a fact that will cause fresh anxiety in a region already battered by more than 25 years of lingering health fears.

It is a quarter of a century since massive quantities of aluminium sulphate, a chemical used to keep drinking water clear, were accidentally dumped into the public supply at Camelford’s Lowermoor treatment works.

It was the worst case of mass poisoning in British history. The effects were noticed within 90 minutes and included diarrhoea and vomiting, severe joint aches, and blistering. Hands and lips stuck together. Hair turned green, fingernails blue.

It seems a long time ago. But if, to the outside world, the matter had been safely laid to rest, a small but determined group of locals has long insisted that the effects of the disaster could be both long-term and devastating. Now, their worst fears appear to be justified...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...oning-evidence-dirty-water-KILLED-people.html

 

[Min]

If there's something strange in the neighbourhood
who you gonna call?

 

[maryb]

that photo makes me feel sick............