In earlier times, doctors and scientists were held in high regard for their altruistic efforts to cure illnesses, prevent diseases, and create a safer, healthier future for humanity. However, in recent years, instances of incompetence and negligence have caused widespread public skepticism towards these professions. Scientists now find themselves on the lower rungs of the ladder of public trust, alongside estate agents and journalists.
Moreover, scientific research is often funded by global companies with a focus on profit rather than disinterested inquiry. Even research funded by government agencies is subject to their demands. The betrayal of the public interest by the scientific community extends beyond funding issues. The community has been responsible for concealing serious errors that have had devastating consequences for public health. Victims were left untreated as their conditions were undiagnosed, and the same mistakes were repeated elsewhere.
The Spanish "cooking oil" disaster is a historical event that illustrates the extent of this betrayal. The epidemic began as a mystery illness, affecting mainly women and children, with flu-like symptoms such as fever, breathing difficulties, vomiting, and nausea, eventually leading to pulmonary edema, skin rashes, and muscle pain. It caused over 1,000 deaths and over 25,000 serious injuries, many of which resulted in permanent disabilities.
This disaster was the prototype of contemporary scientific fraud, a major cover-up by multinational interests in international science. The epidemic did not result from cooking oil, as the official story goes. On May 1, 1981, an eight-year-old boy, Jaime Vaquero Garcia, died suddenly on the way to La Paz children’s hospital in Madrid. Doctors then found that all six members of his family showed the same symptoms of pneumonia. The director of the Hospital del Rey, Madrid’s prestigious clinic for infectious diseases, was alerted to the oddity and gave his staff a reprimand, saying that it was out of the question medically for six members of a family to be suffering from pneumonia at the same time.
The epidemic was national news, and after a few days, the director believed it was food poisoning, marketed through an alternative route. He was certain of this because the casualties were all coming from the apartment blocks of the communities and towns surrounding the capital, and almost no one from Madrid itself appeared to be affected. After conducting half-hour interviews with relatives of affected individuals, they were able to pinpoint salads as the culprit.
On May 12, Dr. Angel Peralta, the head of the endocrinology department at La Paz hospital, publicly suggested that the illness was caused by poisoning by organophosphates. The next day, the health ministry ordered him to say nothing about the epidemic, let alone the possibility of organophosphate poisoning.
In the midst of the epidemic, medical personnel were working tirelessly to care for the sick and dying. However, they were struggling to provide adequate treatment as doctors had no idea what was causing the illness. As the sickness progressed to its chronic stage, patients experienced severe symptoms such as weight loss, hair loss, and limb deformity.
Spain was still a young democracy at the time, having only recently transitioned from dictatorship under General Franco. In February 1981, just three months prior to the outbreak, there was an unsuccessful attempt to restore army rule. This added to the confusion and anxiety surrounding the epidemic, with most people in positions of power lacking a clear strategy to deal with it.
A breakthrough came when Dr. Juan Tabuenca Oliver, the director of the Hospital Infantil de Niño Jesus, identified the cause of the epidemic – contaminated cooking oil. He had discovered this by asking the 210 children in his care, all of whom had consumed the oil.
The government eventually accepted this theory, and on June 10 an official announcement was made on television. The panic subsided almost immediately, and the situation appeared to be under control – although hospitals were still full of victims.
However, Muro and his colleagues were not convinced by the cooking oil theory. In fact, they had obtained test results a day prior that showed a variety of oil samples with different constituents. It was clear that contaminated cooking oil could not be solely responsible for the illness.
The Spanish government had been trying to protect its olive oil industry by preventing imports of cheaper rapeseed oil, but streetwise entrepreneurs continued to import it anyway. Some removed the aniline to make it edible, while others did not. This led to the illness being attributed to aniline poisoning and being colloquially known as "la colza," which is Spanish for "rapeseed."
Several high-profile oil merchants were arrested, and three weeks after the television announcement, the health ministry allowed families to exchange their contaminated oil for pure olive oil. However, this exchange program was poorly managed, with few records kept on which households had exchanged oil, and whether the oil came from affected or unaffected households. As a result, a lot of oil that supposedly caused the epidemic was not available for scientific analysis.
In 1983, an international conference was held in Madrid under the World Health Organisation, officially naming the epidemic toxic oil syndrome (TOS). However, it wasn’t until 1987 that the trial of the oil merchants began. Just before giving his evidence, the respected British epidemiologist Sir Richard Doll announced that, based on fresh reports, he believed the contaminated cooking oil was the cause of the outbreak. To this day, scientists have not been able to meet basic conditions to demonstrate that the oil was responsible for the illness.
Years of continuous media reports led to the “cooking oil” epidemic becoming ingrained in the public consciousness as an undeniable fact. No one doubted the official scientific conclusions, especially since they were accepted by the WHO. However, following the 1983 Madrid conference, the Spanish government hired some of the country’s best epidemiologists, including husband-and-wife team Dr Javier Martinez Ruiz and Dr Maria Clavera Ortiz, to lead a fresh inquiry. Initially believing the oil was responsible but with disorganised information and inadequate research, they set about rigorously examining the official information.
Their findings were shocking. For instance, they discovered that the epidemic had peaked at the end of May, roughly 10 days before the government’s June 10th broadcast and a month before the oil was withdrawn. Moreover, the data revealed that the announcement that the oil was to blame had no impact on the progression of the epidemic. Dr Clavera noted that the suspect oil sold heavily in regions like Catalonia, which had not recorded a single illness case, highlighting that the government knew this during the epidemic. Meanwhile, Enrique Martinez de Genique, who analysed the oil’s patterns of distribution and the illness’s pattern, concluded that the two had no correlation, and therefore, the oil was not the cause of the epidemic. When he presented his findings to the health ministry, he was fired, leading him to retire from politics entirely, though he maintained that he was morally and ethically obliged to express his doubts. Both Dr Martinez Ruiz and Dr Clavera, too, were terminated, and the committee disbanded.
Despite powerful and irrefutable evidence that the suspect oil was sold throughout parts of Spain where no illnesses resulted, statistics were compiled based on victims who admitted to using the oil. Anyone who denied using it was excluded from the count, and only those on the official list were eligible for government compensation. Consequently, there was an incentive for affected persons to say they used the oil, artificially reinforcing the government’s position and making it nearly impossible to assess the epidemic accurately.
However, one man, Muro, went beyond the official lines of inquiry, pursuing his investigation for months, eliminating the cooking oil and focusing on other salad products. By speaking with market vendors, lorry drivers, and around 4,000-5,000 affected families, he confirmed without any doubt that the contaminated foodstuff was tomatoes, and the pesticides on them were responsible for the epidemic. He noted that the organo-phosphorous chemicals used on tomatoes could cause the symptoms observed by clinicians.
The boom in agriculture resulted from the abundant use of chemical substances such as nutrients, fertilizers, and pesticides. It is believed that a farmer may have used the chemicals excessively or harvested the crops too soon after applying them, leading to the proliferation of agricultural diseases. Some of the farmers were illiterate and may have had difficulty understanding the instructions on the containers.
Muro was an advocate for alternative theories, but as the official view gained more support, he was marginalized as the dissident. His sudden death from an unknown illness in 1985 left his wife in a state of dismay.
Muro and his team conducted an epidemiological investigation after the outbreak, but the accuracy of the official epidemiology was difficult to assess. The government agency responsible for toxic oil syndrome refused to release details of fieldwork, making it harder to validate the official reports. We discovered from our inquiries that the official report did not correspond with the family’s history and, in some cases, bore no relation to the reality of the situation. The evidence seemed to be manipulated to support the conclusion rather than gathering evidence and then reaching a conclusion.
Dr. Juan Tabuenca Oliver’s studies that establish the oil theory are not considered adequate because his claims were not consistent. His statement that all 210 children in his care had consumed the oil was disputed, and the number of children in his care kept changing through the years. Moreover, the official analysis of the illness of three people in two families in Seville, one of whom worked in a refinery where the oil had supposedly been refined, was incorrect because the oil was not rapeseed oil, but olive oil.
The oil theory lacked any supporting laboratory science. Despite leading laboratories worldwide analyzing the suspect oils since the outbreak in 1981, they have never found any chemical or contaminant that could explain the symptoms seen in the affected people. Aniline, which was blamed for the epidemic, is only poisonous in far greater quantities than present in the oil. Additionally, the symptoms of aniline poisoning are different from those observed in the affected individuals. Laboratory tests have shown that the oil is not harmful to animals, with researchers observing animals thriving on it with glossier coats and weight gain.
Dr. Gaston Vettorazzi, former chief toxicologist at WHO during the outbreak, believed that the truth was deliberately concealed by the Spanish government instead of occurring due to a series of administrative errors. He stated that the rapeseed explanation was predetermined as the official line. For political and industrial interests, concealing the truth was of substantial common interest. A revelation that a mass poisoning had occurred would have been financially disastrous and scandalous for multinational chemical companies. Suppressing the true cause of the illness was a commercial imperative to protect the vast profits generated from worldwide organo-phosphate sales.
The Spanish government was similarly concerned with controlling the situation during a delicate political time. The attempted coup in parliament was still fresh in the public’s mind, and democracy itself depended on seeing the government handling this national tragedy adequately. Almeria was an economic miracle for Spain, providing produce exported throughout Europe. Acknowledging that the deaths were caused by pesticides on tomatoes would have had an incalculable and potentially calamitous effect on the entire Spanish export trade. Not only that, revealing that home-grown produce such as tomatoes could be poisonous could have severely impacted the tourist trade – Spain’s other main generator of foreign income.
The outcomes of the cover-up were disastrous and led to unnecessary deaths and lifelong physical impairments, particularly among children. Toxic oil syndrome is undoubtedly one of the great scandals and tragedies of the last century. A similar mystery illness in New Mexico in 1989 is suspected to have been caused by organo-phosphate pesticides, resulting in 29 deaths and 1,500 cases across the US. However, the scientific community, funded by paymasters, attributed it to an innocuous amino acid supplement instead of examining the possibility of pesticide exposure. This pattern is repeated regarding the effects of pesticides on farmers in Britain, with official inquiries somehow failing to establish a connection between pesticide exposure and illness.
The TOS saga has a lasting impact on the scientific community as it served as a template for how the truth can be suppressed easily. Even if a theory is blatantly false like the "toxic oil" syndrome, it can still gain international recognition with the help of accredited epidemiological reports published in reputable scientific journals. This begs the question of the authenticity of peer-reviewed scientific papers as it seems that they can be manipulated to fit one’s agenda as long as it’s supported by scientists with a similar mindset. The media, constrained by privacy laws, cannot always verify the data being presented and is left to report what they’re given.
The truth about the Spanish epidemic came to light mainly due to the two-year trial that forced authorities to disclose information. Later on, my own investigation into the epidemic made it possible for me to uncover things that were otherwise unreachable. These days, such thorough journalistic work seems unlikely to occur again. Without the possibility of journalists asking difficult questions, it’s perfect for international science to conceal truths behind a veil of cover-ups.
An internal German government memo was recently leaked to Der Spiegel, stating that there were still unsafe pesticide residues found on imported fruits and vegetables from Spain, particularly highly contaminated peppers. The memo concludes with an ominous statement – "Under no circumstances should the general public be informed."
