Day 038 - 19 Oct 94 - Page 37
1
2 My understanding is that prior to that time, members of
3 those committees were expected to declare their interests
4 to the civil servants of the Department of Health and,
5 perhaps, the chair of the Committee but it was not -- the
6 information was then not necessarily shared with the other
7 members of the committees and there was no public
8 register.
9
10 Since 1991 there has been a public register and members of
11 the Committee on Toxicity, but it is unfortunately quite an
12 incomplete register, so that for some members they just say
13 they have been consultants to many chemicals companies
14 without listing those companies by name.
15
16 The position at the SCF and JECFA is that there is no
17 requirement and no obligation and no expectation for the
18 members of those committees to declare any relevant
19 commercial interest which they may have.
20
21 Q. I want to put it to you: Are the decisions that are being
22 made that are relevant to additives being used in this
23 country considered, can be seen to be, biased in one
24 direction or another; if so, can you just summarise?
25 A. OK. I am not -- I do not make judgments about any of
26 the particular individuals which those committees are
27 comprised, but I do believe that there is very substantial
28 evidence that there is institutional bias within those
29 organisations as a whole. That is to say, time and time
30 again I find evidence that compounds might be hazardous
31 treated far more sceptically than evidence that the
32 compounds might be safe, and when the benefit of the doubt
33 has to be ascribed, time and again it seems to me the
34 evidence is quite clear that the Committee on Toxicity, the
35 Scientific Committee for Food and the Joint Expert
36 Committee on Food Additives give the benefit of the doubt
37 to industry and to the compound and not to the consumers.
38 If you wish to characterise that as a systematic bias,
39 I would not contest that.
40
41 Q. Are the interests of industry and consumers at different
42 poles, in conflict with each other?
43 A. They are not always in conflict, but there are
44 circumstances under which conflicts can arise. It clearly
45 is not in industry's interests for their products
46 conspicuously to cause harm to the people who buy their
47 products. The interests of consumers goes rather further.
48 They are interested not merely in not being rapidly and
49 conspicuously ill by the food they consume, but not being
50 made ill by the food they consume at all over their entire
51 lifetime.
52
53 It seems to me quite clear that in many cases if one is
54 favouring the interests of consumers one would make
55 different judgments and develop different interpretations
56 of the evidence than if one were favouring industry. So,
57 I believe that there are clear cases where the interests do
58 not coincide, though there may be some limited
59 circumstances in which they do coincide.
60
