Mounting scientific evidence shows that what occurred in Askeaton in Co Limerick from the late ’80s to the late ’90s amounts to one of the most extreme incidences of industrial fluoride pollution in the world, with background soil concentration on farms up to five times the global average.
As revealed in the last issue of Hot Press, the official report from the Environmental Protection Agency effectively shut down further public investigation in the area. However, Hot Press has uncovered inconsistencies and contradictions in that report, sufficient to require an official public inquiry.
Further fuel has been added to the call for an inquiry with the revelation that as far back as 2002, Canadian environmental expert Professor Rory Finegan also flatly disputed the findings of the EPA report. “The views expressed by the authors of the EPA report are in conflict with each other and are inconsistent with the data produced by the investigations and are therefore flawed,” Professor Finegan told the Irish Independent in 2002. In 1994/95, Professor Finegan had prepared three reports on the Somers farm, which is located in the Askeaton area – but these were entirely ignored by the EPA report.
The Canadian scientist pointed out that farmers experiencing problems in the area received emissions from several sources and from two major directions, Westerly and Northerly. The Professor stated that emissions from even one factory in the area could exceed the level that caused damage to crops, and illness in animals and humans. However, he pointed out that these ‘pollution events’ were transitory and, having exerted their toxic effects, were replaced by less malign levels. He said the EPA report had ignored this aspect of the behaviour of industrial emissions and had instead considered averages and mean levels over periods of time that “conceal the true state of the atmosphere in the vicinity of the farms.”
This preference is consistent with a calculated attempt to provide a clean bill of health to the industrial plants in the area, irrespective of the evidence. Dr Finegan also pointed out that – diametrically contrary to the EPA statement that suspicions of aluminium and fluoride pollution were not based on any record of contamination – he had personally provided results to the EPA from a specimen taken from an unused water trough, clearly showing significant levels of fluoride fallout on the Somers farm. In effect, this amounted to an accusation that the authors of the EPA report had distorted their findings.
In the preparation of the EPA report, the Dept of Health was given responsibility for investigating claims that human health was being severely affected. Askeaton residents claimed that from the late 1980s onwards, unusually high levels of both human and animal health problems – some very severe and leading to mortalities – were due to pollution from the three large fluoride-emitting industrial plants in the locale. Shockingly, as revealed by Nuala and Pat Geoghegan in this issue of Hot Press, samples they had provided were apparently ‘lost’ by the Mid Western Health Board.
Conveniently, the EPA report dismissed the claims made by the Askeaton farmers. However documents released under Freedom of Information showed that doctors within the MWHB had stated that at least some of the samples had been tested and the results returned. These results were not included in the EPA-led investigation. What happened to them has never come to light.
Meanwhile, Hot Press has learned that in 2001, the Consumer Association of Ireland also condemned the EPA environmental investigation at Askeaton, saying that its conclusions were flawed. The CAI’s analysis of the EPA report said in very clear terms that industrial pollution was causing human and animal health problems in Askeaton.
In the light of this accumulating evidence, it appears increasingly likely that disastrous industrial fluoride poisoning at Askeaton was deliberately covered up by agencies of the Irish government, at the same time as the decision was taken in 2002, by the Forum on Fluoride, to continue fluoridating the population by dumping hydrofluorosilicic acid into the pubic water supplies.
In his groundbreaking book, The Fluoride Deception (2004), the award-winning investigative reporter and television producer Christopher Bryson documented how fluoridation of public water supplies was initiated and promoted by fluoride-polluting industries in the United States, to help mask the problems of fluoride toxicity among workers and communities living alongside fluoride-emitting industries. In Bryson’s analysis, the working assumption was that if you medicate the whole population with fluoride, it is much more difficult to point the finger at industry for fluoride intoxication.
Water fluoridation allows for low-level intoxication of the population and thus, as disease burdens increase within the wider community, it masks the higher burdens of such disease that may exist among workers or communities directly exposed to fluoride pollution. For its proponents in the US, fluoridation was also a means for industry to get rid of highly polluting, toxic waste.
Seen in this light, the closing comments of the EPA’s report – with its glib assurances that neither animal nor human health are in danger from pollution in Askeaton – are positively chilling.
“In summary,” the report said, “while the findings in regard to the causes of the animal health problems have not been as conclusive or precise as the two farmers directly involved, as well as the wider community in the Askeaton area, would have wished, the information collected has enabled a number of possible causes to be largely ruled out of consideration (our emphasis). While this may appear to be an unsatisfactory outcome to some, it is hoped, nonetheless, that it will give assurances that the problems were not due to agents, particularly environmental pollution, with a potential to cause area-wide harm, both to livestock and humans (again, our emphasis). …
“In one sense, the more detailed work which had to be undertaken [as part of the study] may have been useful if it can provide some assurances in the future of the compatibility of industrial development with farming in the Irish countryside.”
The disgraceful evasions of its conclusions notwithstanding, the EPA report did include some recommendations for animal health, including the establishment of a National Toxicology Centre to provide comprehensive expert support for the investigation of suspected pollution incidents which adversely affect human, animal, or environmental health; and also that the Department of Agriculture Food and Rural Development should undertake, as a matter of priority, the establishment and maintenance of a database to record the national incidence of common indigenous diseases of livestock. As for human health, they recommended that a computerised system of monitoring congenital abnormalities should be established as well as a system of surveillance of morbidity in general practice.
Over twelve years later, to our knowledge, none of these recommendations have been activated. Nor has the Department of Health undertaken any survey of the dietary exposure of the general Irish population to fluoride. To some, their reluctance suggests that they have something to hide. Perhaps they have.
Meanwhile the entire population of Ireland must endure the insult and injury of fluoride being added to their water supplies, beverages and food products, with no method of accurately gauging their total dietary exposure.