Chemical Poisoning: Brave New World of Zero Risk

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Brave New World of Zero Risk - Covert strategy in British Science Policy is Martin Walker's latest exposé of scientific corruption. The book takes the chemical and pharmaceutical multinationals to task for bending science in the name of industrial progress and for riding roughshod over the human tragedies of people suffering injury from toxic chemicals.

Supermarket Emma Holister

An incisive investigative writer, Martin Walker is widely known for his monumental Dirty Medicine, which documents the collusion of modern medicine with a greed-driven pharmaceutical industry. In 2004 Walker took up the fight for the chemically injured with another book, Skewed. He examines the scandalous re-definition as a psychiatric problem of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and a related cluster of illnesses. Walker tells of the chemical industry's collaboration with psychiatric and medical "experts" who would have us believe that physical symptoms of chemical poisoning are pure imagination and that the sufferers need a dose of psychiatric drugs and perhaps some motivational therapy.

Brave New World of Zero Risk, available free for download here, continues where Skewed left off. But more than that - Zero Risk shows how pharma, food and chemical giants deal with those who might depress their already threatened profits even further by exposing weak points. Vaccine researcher Dr Andrew Wakefield fell from grace after finding a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. Dr Arpad Pusztai paid with his carreer for insisting that the rats he fed GM potatos in what may well have been the only properly conducted GMO feeding experiment, suffered organ damage as a result.

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Zero Risk contains extensive documentation on how front groups such as the innocent-sounding Social Issues Research Center, known for its strong support of hormone replacement therapy, are slanting the debate the way industry wishes.

"The pharmaceutical corporations can no longer be seen as a part of some social superstructure", says Walker, concluding a chapter on science and its apparently senseless direction. "Their need for a research base, for trial subjects, for organisations to agree licensing and other regulatory matters, together with their need for markets and consumers of their products, means that, like a metastasised cancer, their growth now extends into all areas of society, which has become a massive human laboratory. "

The question becomes: What kind of medicine are we going to have - corporate or scientific?

The quackbusters, pharma's shock troops who attack doctors that do not toe the line, are discussed with a fair bit of history and pointers to their parent organization, the so-called skeptics. 'De-bunking' activities are generally directed towards health practitioners that use cutting edge protocols such as mercury-free dentistry, nutritional immune enhancement and detoxification for chemical injury.

Mercury - Ralax! Emma Holister

Genetically modified foods are pronounced safe and promoted by industry groups. The decision process that led governments to the unquestioning acceptance of genetic modification as an element of science policy, according to Walker, was arrived at behind closed doors. He describes how the policy was put into effect in the UK with these words:

"In clearing the runway for bioscience, New Labour was also clearing it of its citizens. There is no room for ordinary citizens' input into the new world of science, so they have dropped them utterly from the equation, and 'steak' holders (the better fed citizens), are now the powerful vested interests..."

Evidently, people are no longer needed, except as 'consumers'. Pressure groups supplant public input with a vague concept of 'listening to the stake holders'.

Covering up the harm done by industry seems to be a common practice. After citing two instances, the Spanish "contaminated oil" scandal of 1982 that killed hundreds and a 1988 Camelford (UK) water poisoning incident, where 20 tons of toxic chemicals ended up in the town's drinking water, Walker highlights the rationale behind the crazy idea that people suffering from chemical or other environmental pollution are making it all up:

"When you deny the existence of illness presented by patients, you also have to deny the mental health of those patients. So much more so is this the case with environmental illness, where the psychiatrist can first attack the very mind frame of both patient and alternative therapist. In a rational world, the subject who is affected by invisible rays from mobile phones or computer screens can be made to appear mentally unbalanced. If you can see the cause, then it is the job of crisis management, psychiatry, psychology or PR, either to convince everyone that it is not there, or disguise it as something else."

"As the stakes get higher and the crack in the floodgates widens, more subtle plans have to be drafted. These are plans that start at the beginning by defining as mentally ill, those who believe that modern technological ['wonders'] can produce chronic health damage. Mental illness is undoubtedly the best fallback position for those responsible for creating environmental illness. And so it is that psychiatrists become part of the front line troops in denfence of the state and its corporate partners."

Science is being used to cover up, rather than reveal, the effects industrial 'progress' has on our health. Contrary views are rigorously suppressed. Walker says that scientists themselves have to look at how industry uses them to help suppress the evidence of harm.

"At the centre of this almost surgical censorship, which has developed like a cancer in society, are working scientists. On questions of science, it is imperative that scientists themselves wise up to the way in which they and their work are being manipulated."

Caught your interest yet? You can download the PDF of Martin Walker's book. Don't forget to leave a small donation. Walker provides his work for free, but he does need to eat as well...

If, instead, you want to get an even closer look at the subject matter, here is a message from Emma Holister, artist and campaigner for health, who forwards a recent essay by Martin titled "Realpolitik and ME", which you find below.

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Chemical warfare Emma Holister

Teensy weensy Emma Holister

Here is Emma's message:

Martin Walker once again takes us on a guided tour along the sordid money trail of pharmaceutical funding that fuels the psychiatric lobby's defining of M.E. [Myalgic Encephalopathy] as a psychiatric condition rather than an organic illness. 

I consider my own illness, Candida, to be a cousin of M.E., as it is also caused by chemical injury. Those chemicals/drugs are the massively profitable products of the very same chemical and pharma companies who are relentlessly defining these illnesses as psychiatric conditions for which they recommend yet more of their lethal products, anti depressants. Candida is treated as both a 'minor fungal infection' and a stress related psychiatric disorder by most of the medical profession. It is also a major source of profit in the pharma AID$ industry, candida being one of the most common ailments of 'AIDS' sufferers. 

As these issues are so close to my heart and personal campaigns I have included some cartoons that I feel are related.

Emma xxx
www.artmargin.com

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8 November 2005

Realpolitik and ME
By
Martin J. Walker

We live in a period where everything is spin, where the truth is rarely told about public policy and where many public arguments are disingenuous. However, during the contemporary period, everything is confusion. Only when we look back are we able to see clearly how social reality was constructed.

This situation makes it very difficult for campaigners, or those trying to voice a dissenting view to Government or its agencies. While thirty years ago, it might have been possible to engage in a peripheral dialogue with government, today, government and its many agencies is a secretive, shadowy organisation which often invites campaigners to wrestle with phantoms. In contemporary society, there is, in short, no point at which the clear demands of the people might be put to government and a considered answer returned.

One of the principal reasons for this is that over the last fifty years, the government has begun increasingly to act on behalf of hidden constituents. Instead of gauging and responding to the needs of the people, they have increasingly, in the field of health, begun to act on behalf of corporations, foisting their demands onto the public in the form of policy. In some areas, this corporatisation of government is easy to see and describe, in others, it lies deeply hidden and anyone who attempts to unravel it is quickly accused of advocating ‘conspiracy theories’.

The campaign to de-construct the neurological illness ME, to ridicule its sufferers and, in the process, to redefine a growing body of ‘mentally ill’ subjects, began in the mid eighties. The principal character in the British campaign has been Professor Simon Wessely. Over time, however, the ‘psychiatric lobby’ has gathered new adherents and a large, increasingly organised body of combatants.

The psychiatric lobby is now marked by its financial power – over 11 million being funnelled into the network of clinical centres and funding provided by the Medical Research Council (MRC) to carry out the PACE and FINE trials; its roots in major medical research institutions like the MRC and increasingly its links to corporate lobby groups funded especially by the pharmaceutical companies.

The patient, or ‘sufferer’ group which has been forged simply by its opposition to the psychiatric lobby, has inevitably consisted of disparate groups and individuals. Inevitably, because unlike the psychiatric lobby, this grouping has no common ideological purpose nor does it have a hegemonous leadership. Mainly, as well, this group is composed of people who are ill or their carers, ci