Aerotoxic Syndrome versus Pesticide Poisoning

On Friday 14th November 2008 Georgina Downs won a landmark victory in her court case concerning pesticides. The judgement concluded that the British government has been acting unlawfully in its crop spraying policy and the health of the public living in the vicinity to agricultural land is not being adequately protected. Georgina has produced “solid evidence” that people exposed to the chemicals have suffered health problems.

This is a very important victory, as there are clear parallels between the pesticides case and the campaign on aircraft cabin air quality, in terms of what the various government departments and authorities are doing, or not doing. Also, some of the toxins and their related health problems are identical.

On the issue of government departments, the pesticides story and the cabin air one are similar. There is a need for the government to be seen to be doing something, so they set up an enquiry, then determine that there is a “plausible link” between the toxins and health problems, and call for research. These research projects are designed to be open-ended and even manage at the end of it all to conclude that there is “insufficient evidence” to prove the link. Further research is then called for, and so it goes on.

Various enquires have been set up to look at the evidence on the cabin air quality issue, and overwhelming evidence has been submitted clearly demonstrating a major health problem. Unfortunately this evidence is either ignored or discredited, corporate greed means airlines don’t want there to be “a problem”, and vested interests mean that they, the government and the regulators are colluding in covering it up.

The Committee on Toxicity is notable in coming in for heavy criticism from both the UK Pesticides Campaign and Cabin Air Quality campaigners such as the Aerotoxic Association and the GCAQE for producing factual inaccuracies and skewing their data. Of course, as these inconsistencies are brought up, the issues get muddied, doubt is cast, the debate goes round and round and the interminable research continues. Meanwhile nothing gets done to improve the quality of cabin air, and aircrew and passengers continue to get sick.

As for the toxins themselves, the common factor is organophosphates (OPs). They are used extensively in pesticides, as they are in jet engine oil, and the symptoms from poisoning are very similar in both cases. In the 1950s a government committee ordered that OPs be labelled “deadly poisons”. Is hardly seems believable then that these dangerous chemicals, originally designed for their neurotoxic properties are regularly allowed to get into aircraft cabin air supplies.

There must be hope that the pesticides case helps set a precedent for regulations on aircraft cabin air systems.

Why I'm taking my campaign to protect the public from pesticides to Europe, The Guardian, 25 January 2010