Day 163 - 25 Sep 95 - Page 39
1 countless occasions when he got the documents, and that the
2 fact there may be a fax date on there does not mean that is
3 the date that it was faxed to Mr. Morris; it could have
4 been faxed to somebody else first.
5
6 MR. RAMPTON: Whatever the case maybe, it is perfectly apparent
7 (and I do not resile from what I have said unless I am
8 provided with some concrete evidence to the contrary) that
9 the Defendants have had these allegations for a very
10 considerable period of time and have made no use of them
11 until the 25th or maybe last Friday, 22nd September 1995.
12
13 More important than that, my Lord, when one comes to what
14 I call the true issue about food poisoning as raised by the
15 leaflet complained of, one finds, in effect, that the
16 Defendants' expert, Mr. North, became in cross-examination
17 a witness for the Plaintiffs. I say that because -- my
18 Lord, the reference is Friday, 24th March, day 107,
19 starting at page 44, line 41 -- says Mr. North right at the
20 beginning of his evidence in cross-examination: "First of
21 all, one has to say that, refer back to my earlier
22 evidence, you actually have to work very hard to get food
23 poisoning." He then says that food poisoning -- my Lord
24 this is page 61; this is just the end of the passage,
25 I will not read the whole of it, lines 19 to 21 -- this is
26 a question by me: "It is still statistically insignificant
27 as a cause of human illness; is that right?" Answer:
28 "Statistically, yes." He then accepted, page 62, at the
29 bottom that, as compared with a ham sandwich in a corner
30 cafe, the risk of food poisoning at a McDonald's store was,
31 to summarise it, insignificant. Then my Lord, finally, on
32 page 77 in relation to salmonella he said: "I do not think
33 frankly" -- this is at lines 31, 32, 33 -- "salmonella food
34 poisoning from McDonald's is a major risk". I then asked
35 him whether he agreed that it was insignificant and he
36 answered: "Would you be content with my saying I would not
37 waste a lot of time on it", and I responded that I would be
38 very content with that.
39
40 My Lord, I read those passages because it does put, in our
41 submission, the significance of this application in
42 relation to mouse droppings and so on very firmly into its
43 proper prospective. I say that that is important, not
44 because we have not had to deal with a whole lot of trivia
45 most or some of which have been barely relevant and not
46 relevant at all during the course of this case, but because
47 at this stage in the case, if we are to deal with these
48 allegations, it is going to cost us a wholly
49 disproportionate amount of time and money to deal with
50 them.
51
52 First of all, we have to investigate every single one of
53 them. They go back as far as 1987. There are two in
54 1994. The rest are, I think, all 1987 and 1988.
55
56 Assuming there is no convenient central file in which these
57 matters are recorded or their results are recorded, one
58 then has to go all the over the United States finding out
59 what actually happened, remembering that these allegations
60 are based on a computer printout of extracts from newspaper
