Day 038 - 19 Oct 94 - Page 25


     
     1        additives is rather tricky.  A study upon which Professor
     2        Walker and many of his colleagues rely is a study conducted
     3        under the auspices of the British Government's Department
     4        of Health, conducted by Elspeth Young of High Wycombe and
     5        Maurice Lesoff in London.
     6
     7        One of the points I recognise they make is that most people
     8        who are intolerant to food additives are also intolerant to
     9        some foods; typically those might be something like dairy
    10        products, milk dairy products, shell fish, some soft fruits
    11        and so on.
    12
    13        Now, if you are going to estimate the true frequency of
    14        intolerance to additives, it is necessary first to persuade
    15        your sample population to adopt what we call an exclusion
    16        diet, namely, a diet which excludes all those things to
    17        which they are intolerant, not just the additives; whereas
    18        my reading of the Young and Lesoff study is that they did
    19        not put the individuals they were studying on an exclusion
    20        diet.  Therefore, the signal for which they were supposedly
    21        searching was likely to be smothered by reactions to foods
    22        to which they were also intolerant.  Therefore, that study
    23        amongst many others I think systematically underestimates
    24        the true incidence.
    25
    26        I have been in contact with some researchers in a hospital
    27        in the University of Verona who are, I believe, adopting
    28        what I take to be the appropriate methodology, but I have
    29        not seen the final results of their study.
    30
    31        So, if I am pressed on the incidence of intolerance to food
    32        additives, my answer would be that I do not think anyone
    33        knows what the real incidence is yet.  The studies which
    34        have been conducted seem to me to be seriously flawed.
    35        They typically come up with answers that the incidence is,
    36        say, fewer than one in 1,000, maybe one in 10,000.  I have
    37        heard it alleged by some people, on the other hand, that
    38        the incidence may be as high as 50 per cent of the
    39        population or 20 per cent of the population.  I suspect
    40        that those are overestimates.  I do not know what the true
    41        figure will turn out to be in the UK population or in the
    42        Italian population, but I would not be surprised, simply
    43        drawing on my experience and the enormous number of people
    44        who contact me reporting adverse effects to additives, if
    45        the true figure was somewhere in the order of not less than
    46        one per cent and not more than five or eight per cent.  But
    47        the figures of one in 10,000 or one in 50,000 I find very
    48        implausible.
    49
    50   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Can I just understand that?  That is relating 
    51        to the additives we are considering, or some of them, is 
    52        it, or some additives somewhere? 
    53        A.  The class of additives suspected of provoking acute
    54        reactions of intolerance are larger than -- do not
    55        precisely overlap with the group we are looking at.  But at
    56        least four of the ones we are looking at are amongst the
    57        group of compounds suspected of provoking such acute
    58        adverse effects.
    59
    60   Q.   Amongst the additives, what?

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