Day 107 - 24 Mar 95 - Page 60
1 identified. The speculations which have emerged from some
2 papers on E.coli suggest that the appearance of these
3 highly distinctive, very severe cases may be the exception
4 rather than the rule, and that there may be a background
5 level of low level infection which is indistinguishable
6 from -- it may be mild, it may be slightly more serious or
7 the same -- from normal gastroenteritis or normal
8 dysentery-type diseases which are never identified because
9 nobody is looking for them.
10
11 I draw your attention to the phenomenon we saw with
12 campylobacter which was quite remarkable at the time,
13 because if you look at the graph from one year when people
14 were learning how to look for campylobacter and developing
15 the tests, we would have a few hundred one year and the
16 next year we had several thousand that you might they had
17 seen an explosive growth; all it was a change and an
18 improvement in the development of testing which suddenly
19 recognised the burden of disease that hitherto had escaped
20 attention. I am trying to be fair and consistent by saying
21 I do not know that E.coli is a rare disease, E.coli 0157.
22 The scenario which you put to me could be true, but on the
23 evidence available it could also not be true.
24
25 Q. I am not asking -- I am sorry, have you finished?
26 A. Yes.
27
28 Q. I am very careful if I can be never to interrupt. I am not
29 asking for certainties. I am not asking you to make the
30 sort of statement on which you might be prosecuted under
31 the Trade Descriptions Act, Mr. North. I am asking for
32 your best estimate as a professional man of the incidence
33 of E.coli 0157: H7 poisoning in this country as compared
34 with the incidence of salmonellosis?
35 A. Sir, I think the jury is out. In a few years time we
36 will begin to know the answers to those questions.
37
38 Q. Leave it then.
39
40 MR. JUSTICE BELL: It has been put in very general terms just
41 that it is much less.
42 A. The acute, sir, serious illness is clearly less than
43 salmonella, indisputable. Whether or not the burden of
44 E.coli illness right across the spectrum in the community
45 is less than salmonella, I do not know.
46
47 MR. RAMPTON: Can we return, please, to page 116 which really
48 more or less is the end of the book but I would not swear
49 to that, under the heading "Keeping things in proportion",
50 it says: "At the end of all this we should keep in
51 perspective the number of food poisoning cases as a
52 percentage of the number of meals eaten." Are you speaking
53 there of food poisoning cases generally, I mean you
54 jointly, or are you speaking merely about salmonellosis?
55 A. I think you can have application to both.
56
57 Q. "It is so small as to be statistically insignificant and a
58 number of deaths even more so." Does that hold good today?
59 A. Yes, it still applies.
60
