from Sunday Herald, 29 February 2004
The Scottish fish farming industry has been accused of desperately trying to intimidate the scientists who raised the alarm about the dangers of eating salmon contaminated with toxic chemicals.
Dr David Carpenter, the US health expert at the eye of the storm over the safety of farmed salmon, has also attacked the Food Standards Agency (FSA), the government watchdog that defended the industry, as “arrogant and ignorant”.
And he is totally unrepentant about his study, published in Science magazine on January 9, warning people that eating salmon farmed in Scotland more than three times a year would significantly increase their chances of getting cancer. In fact, he is planning to release more research suggesting that the health risks are even greater.
In a forthright and wide-ranging interview with the Sunday Herald, Carpenter condemned reports last week that he ducked out of a meeting in Edinburgh because he was worried about a threat of legal action from the fish farming industry.
“That’s absolute nonsense. I have had no conversations with lawyers about going to Scotland,” he said. He decided to pull out of the conference when he realised that it was going to be a “crisis management meeting” for the industry involving less than than 50 people.
“I am not afraid of meetings where people disagree with me. Quite the contrary, I thrive on it. But I don’t have the time to gallivant halfway around the world to a meeting that is not likely to be productive in terms of changing policies,” he said.
“The only thing that disturbed me was the idea that I’m so chicken I’m afraid to come to Scotland. That is just ludicrous. ”
Carpenter sent the conference organisers, a food industry think tank called Leatherhead Food International, an e-mail explaining that he had been travelling almost continuously for the past six weeks. This had been to the neglect of his teaching and research duties at the Institute for Health and the Environment in the State University of New York, he wrote.
But Leatherhead Food International last week claimed Carpenter “had to withdraw his attendance at the meeting on the advice of his colleagues, lawyers and university”.
Carpenter is scathing about the salmon farming industry’s widely-reported threat to take him to court. “There is absolutely no basis at all for legal action ,” he said. “I think it would only make the industry look even more foolish than it does.
“We will vigorously defend our data to anybody, whether it be to lawyers or the public. I think it’s sabre-rattling and trying to intimidate us, and we’re not intimidated by that.”
The industry’s tactics betrayed its desperation about the impact the study was having on its business, he argued. “We want it to have an economic impact because we feel that the product it is making at present is harmful to people. It causes cancer.”
Despite early industry denials of a potential drop in sales, evidence suggests the market for Scottish farmed salmon has fallen by a fifth, particularly in France and other European countries.
The solution, said Carpenter, was to remove the contaminants, which include PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), dioxins and pesticides, from the fish feed in which it is concentrated. But instead the industry seemed to be in denial, he said.
“They can’t discredit the science, so they are trying to discredit the public relations,” he alleged. The salmon industry has made much of the fact that Carpenter and his colleagues from three other US universities hired a PR company to promote their results.
But he argued that they had a “moral obligation” to make their findings known to as many people as possible. He said: “I am a public health physician and, for a certain number of people, this is a matter of life and death. It was really very necessary that our results were not tucked away in some scientific paper where only a few academics would ever see them.”
Carpenter argued that the Science study underestimated the health risks, focusing only on cancers that could be triggered by three contaminants. This was only “the tip of the iceberg”, he suggested.
He was planning to publish up to six more studies examining risks to the immune system, to hormones and to the intelligence of young children.
Scottish Quality Salmon responded by launching a fierce counter-attack. “We believe that Dr Carpenter acted irresponsibly in sanctioning the scaremongering publicity for his research,” said the industry association’s chief executive, Brian Simpson.
The model on which his research relied was “scientifically flawed” and it was financed by a trust that funds campaigns against industry. “David Carpenter was reprehensible in trying to persuade people away from a product which is actually very good for them,” claimed Simpson.
He refused to confirm, however, whether court action would be taken against Carpenter. “Scottish Quality Salmon is currently taking legal advice on whether or not to pursue legal action,” he said.
Carpenter also slammed the FSA, which advises people to eat a portion of oily fish like salmon every week because it helps reduce the risk from heart attacks.
His dealings with the FSA about salmon in recent weeks had left him regarding it as “pretty incredibly arrogant and ignorant”. The FSA declined to respond to the criticism.
