Day 206 - 22 Jan 96 - Page 03

     
     1        suggested that certain additives were or might be the cause
     2        of certain adverse reactions.  Is that not right?
     3
     4   MR. ATKINSON:  What, perhaps, I am saying is that your Lordship
     5        envisaged that in a further statement there would be
     6        details of the actual incidents that Dr. Millstone was
     7        contending for of ill-effects in relation to the various
     8        additives that are in issue in this case.  Actually, what
     9        Dr. Millstone was saying then was that he was not able to
    10        give that detail, because at that stage he said: "There is
    11        not the information available to me to do that and, in any
    12        event, I do not think that there are studies which do show
    13        to my satisfaction the real levels of incidents of
    14        ill-effects."  But, anyway, he said he would go away and
    15        have a look and see whether he could come up with
    16        something.
    17
    18        What he has come up with in summary appears on page 2 of
    19        this further statement which he has delivered.  I do not
    20        know whether your Lordship has it?
    21
    22   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Yes.
    23
    24   MR. ATKINSON:  On page 2 at the fourth and fifth paragraphs --
    25        I do not know if your Lordship wanted to read that -- what
    26        he is essentially saying, I would submit, is much of what
    27        he said when he was here back in October 1994, namely, that
    28        he concludes that no one knows the true scale of the
    29        problem, but he has grounds for concluding that "most of
    30        the empirical studies and all the official judgments have
    31        tended to under-estimate rather than over-estimate the
    32        scale of the problem".
    33
    34        My submission would be that that is actually what he was
    35        saying when he came last time, and things have not really
    36        moved on since then.  The only way in which things have
    37        moved on is that he has cited in this further statement
    38        some studies which have come up with various figures for
    39        incidents, but the overall conclusion he comes to is that
    40        you cannot come to any conclusion as to the true scale.
    41
    42        So, in other words, to be honest, he has not answered the
    43        question that he himself sets himself in the fourth
    44        paragraph on page 2, which is: "What is the incidence of
    45        adverse reactions to food additives in the population as a
    46        whole?"  That, as I understood it from the transcripts, is
    47        what your Lordship was not necessarily wanting but was
    48        envisaging happening.
    49
    50        What Dr. Millstone has not done, as he did in fact do in 
    51        his first statement, is take each additive as it has been 
    52        pleaded and then, under the heading of each additive, 
    53        say: "There has been this study or there has been that
    54        study, and my conclusion is that this one is to be
    55        preferred.  I submit that this is the incidence amongst the
    56        human population for the purposes of assisting the court";
    57        and he has not done that.
    58
    59        It may well be one might say that is because it is not
    60        possible, or one might say it is because (as we would