Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)

19 JANUARY 2004

DR JON BELL AND DR ANDREW WADGE

  Q60 Chairman: In asking people to frame bids, did you set out a standard operating procedure for what they should do?

  Dr Bell: Not in the way that we now talk about the standard operating procedure. Certainly it was made clear what was required. It had to be done in line with EU legislation and that meant effectively following the Yasumoto approach. That was understood.

  Q61 Chairman: You had a competitive bid. In comes this bid from CEFAS. They start doing the tests. It is argued in a different way to the way it had been done in Aberdeen and all of a sudden you find yourself massacring mice. Did a bell not ring that it could have been due to a change in the lab, a change in the methodology or the climate?

  Dr Bell: The story is not quite as straightforward as that. We might well have drawn that sort of conclusion, quite rightly, if it had been straightforward. Although there was a change in England and Wales as to who was doing the testing, there was not a change in Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland testing had always been done for very many years by the Department of Agriculture's laboratory there and they carried on doing it. They started to get exactly the same results at about the same time.

  Q62 Chairman: Did they change their methods?

  Dr Bell: They did not. They had been operating at that time for a while, certainly some time, using the mouse test and they began to see quite independently much the same sort of results.

  Q63 Chairman: There was no change in Scotland.

  Dr Bell: No. They were using a rather different approach in Scotland. You have heard some of the detail of that in terms of the amount of extractions they were doing, over what period and whether they stood their extractions overnight. There were some differences in the way that they were doing the work. There is no real evidence for this one way or another but you could argue they might not have been as vigorous in the extraction of material. That is a possible interpretation. I am not saying it is the only one. We were not clear why these differences should appear.

  Q64 Chairman: At what stage did you begin to think, "This is not a new toxin", a killer toxin or whatever; "This is a change in the way it is done"?

  Dr Bell: We never thought that. We never have thought that. We took the view that we did not know what was causing this effect. We still do not know clearly what is causing this effect. What we had to ask ourselves was: "Are we certain this is not a new toxin?" If we are certain of that, we can proceed as normal but if we think that one possible explanation here is a new toxin, and we cannot rule it out, what position should we take in terms of protecting human health? We were very mindful of the lessons that have been learned since the days of BSE about what one does in the face of uncertainty in such a situation and that is that you take reasonable precautionary action to ensure that you do not learn after the event that it might have been a toxin.

  Q65 Alan Simpson: When you talk about not knowing what caused the effect, is it correct that when you changed the procedures, since doing that, there has not been an effect?

  Dr Bell: There have been no atypical results in the last two or three months. When we plotted out what had been happening previously, it is clear that there had been a drop in the number found before the changes were made. One could not necessarily draw the conclusion that it was as a result of making further changes to the methodology that it has now dropped down effectively to zero. Two positives were found immediately after CEFAS made the changes and then it dropped away after that. Positives were being found in Northern Ireland consistently because it was effectively their methodology that was transferred across to CEFAS and the Aberdeen laboratory with some changes.

  Q66 Chairman: You were taking reassurance from Northern Ireland but Northern Ireland changed from feeding it to rats in 2000 to using the mouse tests. They did not have the experience that the Aberdeen laboratory had in using mice, so you were both going down the same track.

  Dr Bell: That is true, but they had been doing the mouse test for some while before these atypical results started to turn up. You would think, if it was their inexperience with the methodology, you would see it almost immediately that they moved away from the rat and that was not the case. The other factor we have to take account of here is that not every cockle result turns up positive. Far from it. A good 60% over the three years we are talking about have turned out negative.

  Q67 Chairman: You have just said to us you did not think and you do not think now it is the methodology.

  Dr Bell: We do not say that at all. We are not clear what it is.

  Q68 Chairman: You must have been suspicious because you then commissioned studies of the methodology.

  Dr Bell: We have been looking at all the facets of it, which is what you would expect us to do. If we had been clear it was a toxin and we had good evidence for that, it would not have been necessary to have done anything else on that, except perhaps to try to characterise what that toxin was. Because we were not clear and there was a range of possible explanations, we thought it necessary to do work right across the spectrum. We have done quite a lot of work looking at the methodology and we are doing some toxicological work to look at the possible threat to human health as well. We are under way with that now.

  Q69 Chairman: Somebody said tests are done on Monday and Tuesday and you have the results by Thursday or Friday. By that stage a lot of the stuff can have been eaten, can it not?

  Dr Bell: Yes. We are trying to work in the most realistic way we can. We are trying to be as proportionate as we can. Our main concern here with toxins of this type is about consistent consumption over a period. We took the view—you may say it was a wrong view to take—that consumption over a period of a few days would not be an issue in itself and we should act as soon as we definitely had positive results that we felt we could act on.

  Q70 Chairman: You had positive results and people did not die or fall ill.

  Dr Bell: No, they have not, so perhaps we are not looking at an acute effect here. The difficulty with all this is that these toxins do not only manifest themselves in that way. We have had discussions with Professor Yasumoto and he has been able to produce evidence that shows that some animals on which he has done toxicological studies appear healthy until he opens them up.

  Q71 Mr Breed: Can we look at the way in which differing laboratories came up with differing results, differently interpreted by different people? Why was there no standard operating procedure put in place right at the beginning so that at least there was some comparability between the laboratories involved?

  Dr Bell: I take the point. With hindsight, we should have taken steps to do that. This general shellfish testing has a long history and it had never been considered necessary to do it up to then. As long as you followed the Yasumoto approach—and there were variations that scientists made around the general core of that approach—nobody thought it necessary to have an absolutely standardised method in every regard. That had never been negotiated and agreed in Brussels. As far as I know, no Member State had taken any action to do that. Once we got into this position, it became very clear very quickly that we needed to do some standardisation because obviously laboratories testing within the UK around the same waters should, one would presume, have been obtaining the same type of results, had variation.

  Q72 Mr Breed: In the bid process, there was no laid down procedure that you required of them in order to fulfil the contract for the testing? They could do what they liked?

  Dr Bell: No, not to that extent, not fine detail laid down, as every step would be laid down as in a standard operating procedure, but making it quite clear that the procedure had to follow the EU requirements which are the Yasumoto method.

  Q73 Mr Breed: That is then; this is now. Do all laboratories now operate under an SOP?

  Dr Bell: Yes.

  Q74 Mr Breed: Which was laid down by?

  Dr Bell: We drew the laboratories together following Hugh Makin's report where he had found discrepancies between the various laboratories we thought ought to be addressed. He did not consider these materially affected the results but nevertheless he thought it sensible that we should take action to tighten these up so that is what we did. We called a meeting of the laboratories and everyone agreed that the methodology which should be followed would be the Northern Ireland methodology with some small tweaks.

  Q75 Mr Breed: The Northern Ireland one is now being carried out in the other two laboratories?

  Dr Bell: Yes.

  Q76 Mr Breed: What effect has that had on the test results?

  Dr Bell: At the moment we are in this period—long may it last—where we are not getting positives.

  Q77 Mr Breed: From anyone?

  Dr Bell: From anyone. Whether that is as a result of the change to the standard operating procedure or whether it just happens that we have fallen into a period when the problem has gone away for the time being, it is not possible to say. We have looked at what was happening immediately before this and sure enough the number of positives was falling away anyway before we made this change. We do not feel confident that we can make the decision, at this stage anyway, on only a few months of negatives. Either the toxin has gone away or the change in the methodology resulted in the change.

  Q78 Mr Breed: If everything carries on as it is at the moment, when would you expect to be able to say that everything is okay?

  Dr Bell: The principal thing we have to do is to complete the toxicology. If this toxicology comes out negative, I think we will be pretty confident that we do not have a threat to human health here and that is assuming that the toxicological experts on the independent committees agree with that. Then we will be fairly confident that whatever the background to this was there was not a threat to human health and we can take action accordingly.

  Q79 Ms Atherton: You appointed Professor Hugh Makin to come in and independently audit the testing. What was your response to Dr Askew's assertion from the Shellfish Association that Professor Makin could not say that ether did not cause the atypical results?

  Dr Bell: Professor Makin did say quite clearly in his report he did not consider the carry over of solvent was giving rise to the observed results. That was his professional view. Obviously, one combines that with other information but we did not take that as an absolute, definitive answer to the question of solvent carryover and we have done quite a lot of work since to make sure that solvent levels are kept absolutely as low as possible.


 
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