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Filler Episode - Toxic Oil Syndrome
43 Plays1 year ago
Since M is en route to China (did we mention that M is going back to China?), Josh supplies a story of mass food poisoning in Spain with conflicting explanations. Listen as he tries to pronounce the word "epidemiological" repeatedly while his children do the dishes in the noisiest way possible in the background!
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Transcript
Podcast Changes & New Format
00:00:05
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dint.
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison, and it's just me today. So after we recorded last week's episode, it occurred to us that although we have mentioned this to our patrons in the bonus episodes, we hadn't actually talked about upcoming changes to the podcast with you, our wider listenership.
Solo Episode & Topic Selection
00:00:43
Speaker
So, surprise, M's in China again.
00:00:47
Speaker
Em has taken up a position once more at Zhuhai University in China and would be there, must be there by now, probably getting settled in as we speak. So for this week it's just going to be me and then hopefully from next week we'll be back to the internet-based recording which seemed to do the job. The last time Em was over there
00:01:10
Speaker
So that's going to be the new normal, we hope, from next week. But for now, it's just another one of those good old filler episodes from me. And I've once again dug into our little bag of potential topics and pulled out an interesting one, another depressing one. They're all depressing. We need to do more work at finding whimsical, hilarious conspiracy theories to talk about maybe. But this isn't one. This is another dire one.
00:01:39
Speaker
uh so i should play it i should also get a chart do we need a josh's truly episodes chime ends ends the usual chime smith so we don't actually have one of those but we'll see i'm gonna play something and then i'm gonna start talking about this week's topic
Introduction to Spanish Toxic Oil Syndrome
00:01:59
Speaker
So, what I have to talk to you about today is toxic oil syndrome, not just any toxic oil syndrome, Spanish toxic oil syndrome. You see, in 1981, Spain experienced a somewhat confounding wave of illnesses, which would eventually see around 20,000 people hospitalized,
00:02:22
Speaker
with a condition that left thousands of them disabled and resulted in between 300 and 1,000 deaths, depending on who you listen to. It was not an isof here. The first official victim of this outbreak was a young boy who unfortunately died on the way to La Paz Children's Hospital in Madrid on the 1st of May 1981.
00:02:49
Speaker
The disease people noticed seemed to disproportionately affect women and children. Now, when the people at the hospital found out that this boy's five siblings were also affected with whatever it was that it had killed him, they were taken to hospital as well, where they were treated for what appeared at first to be pneumonia.
Early Investigations & Suspicions
00:03:09
Speaker
This condition, whatever was wrong with them, was affecting their lungs and the various victims.
00:03:17
Speaker
Just a very nasty thing. It affected their lungs, but various other organs did all sorts of very nasty, serious damage throughout the body, which, as I say, resulted in numerous deaths in some of the people who survived in lifelong debilitation.
00:03:32
Speaker
Now, although they thought it was pneumonia, when the hospital's director, a Dr. Antonio Miro, Yifenand Escavada, who will be coming up a bit, when he got in and heard what was going on, he basically said, no, no, it can't be pneumonia. It was, according to what I've read, quote, medically impossible.
00:03:52
Speaker
unquote, for five members of a family to be suffering the same symptoms of pneumonia at the same time. I guess if it were actually a pneumonia outbreak, you'd expect one person to get it and then spread it to the others. So the symptoms would be spread out, would be staggered between them or something. So he said, no, it can't be that they're all suffering from pneumonia in this way. It has to be something else.
00:04:13
Speaker
Unfortunately, this family was far from the only one affected, and as many more cases of people suffering from the same symptoms started to show up, Dr Murrow said to the media that he suspected it was some sort of food poisoning, something that these people had all come into contact with the same thing at the same time, which had all affected them in the same way.
00:04:33
Speaker
So because the cases had all been coming from sort of towns and communities around Madrid, but not from the city itself, he figured this was probably something that had come from the local markets in these communities. And he and his colleagues started interviewing the various family members of the people who'd been affected, trying to work out what it could have been that the people who'd been affected by this had eaten recently, that the people who weren't affected had not eaten.
Government Response & Official Theory
00:05:03
Speaker
and fairly quickly they hit on salad seems to be the thing that all the victims had in common. So Dr. Murrow assumed that the source would have come from these travelling markets that went around the communities from town to town
00:05:18
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In fact, it must have been something that had been purchased at these markets and was in fact able to predict where the next cases would come from by looking at, OK, people just got sick from this area where the markets have just been. They're now just moving to this new area. So we're probably going to see cases coming from that area. And he was right.
00:05:37
Speaker
of course, was cold comfort to the people who were already ill, because this didn't actually get them any closer to a cure, it just got them a little bit closer to working out what the ultimate cause of this illness was. So he went to the markets himself, apparently, and noticed that there was a big, big containers of cooking oil being sold there and thought, oh, maybe that's
00:06:00
Speaker
Maybe that's the cause. And sure enough, a month into the outbreak, a Dr. Juan Tabuenco Olive, who was the director of another hospital, also declared that cooking oil was the cause, that he had supposedly interviewed all of the children in his hospital who were sick, and every one of them had eaten a meal involved in cooking oil, given that it was presumably used as salad oil before they got sick.
00:06:27
Speaker
The government fairly quickly accepted this theory and then announced publicly that yes, we've determined that this illness that's going all over the place and is affecting so many people is food poisoning as a result of contaminated cooking oil. So throw out your cooking oil if you're not sure about it.
00:06:48
Speaker
and indeed actually started an exchange program where people could hand over potentially tainted oil and receive new olive oil instead. And so around the time they made this announcement, once this was communicated, the cases dropped dramatically and the panic, which you can imagine was going on in society, subsided fairly quickly as well.
00:07:11
Speaker
So this then was the official theory of what was going on, and it did seem to make some sort of sense. So the history of it is that to protect the local olive oil industry, Spain had legislated that rapeseed oil, which was a lot cheaper and which was imported from other countries, could only be used for industrial purposes.
00:07:33
Speaker
And to ensure that this was the case, any rapeseed oil sold in Spain had to have a chemical called aniline added to it to make it inedible. But people still imported the oil, denatured it to remove the aniline, and then sold it as cooking oil on the cheap.
00:07:50
Speaker
Now, the illness and death was put down to inlain poisoning as a result of sellers either not properly removing the inlain or just not bothering to at all, because they're already breaking the law by selling it as cooking oil, so the less scrupulous among them might have just flicked it off as cheaply as they could. So eventually a bunch of oil merchants were arrested and
00:08:15
Speaker
charged with various crimes around causing this outbreak and being ultimately responsible for between 300 and 1000 deaths. Apparently only a very small number of them, only like three or four of them actually received jail time as a result of this, but they were where the blame was
Arrests & Emergence of Conspiracy Theories
00:08:36
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laid.
00:08:36
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And for a long time afterwards, there were organisations devoted to getting compensation for the victims of so-called toxic oil syndrome. As far as I know, they could still be around today. They seemed to persist for quite a while after the outbreak was ended.
00:08:53
Speaker
So that is the official theory, the official story put forward by the Spanish government. But there is also a conspiracy theory associated with this whole affair. So back in 2001, 20 years after the initial event,
00:09:09
Speaker
An investigative journalist called Bob Waffenden published a story called Cover Up in The Guardian, where he put forward a different version of events. Because while there is a logic, I guess, to the official theory, you knew you had this stuff that shouldn't have been fit for human consumption that was being sold for human consumption, there were still problems with the official theory. And the biggest problem with the official theory is that
00:09:39
Speaker
While it says all the epidemiological evidence proves that cooking oil was the cause, and by that they mean studying the outbreak and how it had happened and what the people had in common, they believe they had determined that people who had ingested this oil had got sick and people who didn't didn't, therefore that is their evidence that cooking oil was the cause. In spite of that,
00:10:04
Speaker
no one has ever been able to say exactly how the poisoning worked, exactly how it was that this tainted oil caused these people to get sick and in some cases die. And then poisoning is a thing, but by itself doesn't cause the exact symptoms that the victims experienced. And subsequent experiments to try and sort of come up with a causative agent
00:10:31
Speaker
have basically come up short. There's a lot of chemistry involved, which didn't make a lot of sense to me, but the short version appears to be that they were assuming that certain chemical compounds would have been present in these kinds of cooking oil that had had stuff done to it, and that these particular compounds would have been poisonous to people, but then when they actually got these compounds and tested them on animals, they showed that of the three different candidate compounds that they believe would have been present in these oils,
00:11:00
Speaker
Apparently, one of them proved to be not poisonous at all. One of them was only poisonous if it was delivered in quantities much, much greater than would have existed in the oil. And one of them was only poisonous if it was injected, but not if it was ingested. So there's always been this problem with the official theory that they believe they've got evidence that shows cooking oil must have been the cause, and yet they have never been able to show how it was actually the cause.
Alternate Theories & Economic Motives
00:11:28
Speaker
So there was an alternate theory. Near the start of Mr. Woffenden's article, when he's talking about the early stages of this outbreak, he writes, on May the 12th, and remember that the first case was May the first, so there's less than two weeks into the outbreak, on May the 12th, Dr. Angel Peralta, the head of the endocrinology department at La Paz Hospital, pointed out in a newspaper article that the symptoms of the illness were best explained by, quote, poisoning by organophosphates.
00:11:58
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end quote. The following day he received a telephone call from the health ministry ordering him to say nothing about the epidemic and certainly nothing about organophosphorus poisoning. So right away he's suggesting some some sort of a cover-up maybe going on.
00:12:13
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And he also points out that Dr. Munno was also dismissed as head of his hospital fairly early on in the affair. The article doesn't actually say specifically why he was dismissed. That part of it wasn't clear. Apparently it happened.
00:12:30
Speaker
or at least it's mentioned in the article directly after the bit where he successfully was able to predict where outbreaks were going to occur and yet had not come any closer to a cure. So maybe the implication was that he was dismissed because it had been a couple of weeks and he hadn't produced any results. Maybe that was it, but the article unfortunately doesn't, judges simply says, you know, he was fired at that time.
00:12:56
Speaker
Now, he, though, continued investigating with a bunch of colleagues, and they found apparently around the same time the government was officially announcing that cooking oil was the cause of this illness, they found that oil samples that they had taken from various affected households and had analyzed were all different. There were all sorts of different kinds of oils with different kinds of compositions. And so they believed, while Dr. Muunai himself had first
00:13:24
Speaker
been one of the people who thought cooking oil could have been the cause. When they saw that there was a wide range of different oils involved, then said, like, oh, well, it can't be oil then, because there are so many different ones, they don't have anything in common, so that can't be the source. And so having investigated further at the other things people have been eating, they eventually concluded that the source of this illness was actually tomatoes.
00:13:47
Speaker
tomatoes, which had been contaminated by organophosphates and pesticides. The area that they had come from was an area in the southern part of Spain that had been quite dry and desert-y, but then in the 70s they found
00:14:05
Speaker
underground water that combined with new farming techniques in particular, the use of new fertilizers and pesticides had allowed them to get a booming farming operation going there.
00:14:21
Speaker
And so now the theory was that farmers who were not used to these new chemicals that they were being told to use on their crops had maybe used more than they should have, had maybe, there's no specific theory, but one way or another
00:14:37
Speaker
these poisonous compounds were able to end it up on the tomatoes one way or another. And so that these people who had been affected was not a result of aniline poisoning, it was a result of organophosphorus poisoning, which of course is what that other doctor had said as a guess of what it seemed like to him earlier on.
00:15:01
Speaker
At the time, there were some people who agreed with Dr. Murrow's idea, but he was coming up with this after the government had already announced that, yes, cooking oil is the cause, everyone had heard that that had become the official line, and so it was a lot harder for an opposing theory to gain traction. And then, unfortunately, he died in 1985, and I guess with its main proponent gone, the pesticide theory lost a lot of its support, it would seem.
00:15:31
Speaker
So the conspiracy theory that Mr. Offenden is suggesting is that the Spanish government endorsed the oil theory and actively suppressed the pesticide theory largely for sort of economic and political reasons. So blaming imported foreign oil
00:15:49
Speaker
would be much better than blaming locally grown produce. If they get people to stop buying this imported oil, which they weren't supposed to be buying in the first place, that would only be good for the local olive oil industry. Whereas if it turned out that locally grown tomatoes had been poisoning people, then that's obviously going to be bad for Spain's economy. We would have all sorts of implications for the farming operations in that part of Spain, and could potentially do damage to the economy.
00:16:18
Speaker
The Spanish government apparently was not super stable in the early 1980s. Spain had been a dictatorship under Franco until the mid-70s, so it hadn't been a functioning democracy for very long, and apparently there had even been a minor sort of attempted coup just a few months before all this kicked off earlier in 1981. A general or colonel or someone held a bunch of MPs at gunpoint
00:16:43
Speaker
while trying to reinstate military rule or something like that. Nothing much came of that. But obviously the government was very keen not to provoke any sort of doubt in its abilities.
Critiques & Evidence Assessment
00:16:55
Speaker
So a fast solution that gave them certainty, that allowed them to give a clear answer to the people, stop any sort of panic, while also strengthening local business, would be the best for them.
00:17:06
Speaker
that's that's the theory that that Woffenden's putting forward that the government picked the theory that was best for them and actively worked to promote that one while covering up the other in his eyes at least more plausible theory as to what actually went on so that's that's the motive for a conspiracy to cover up uh when you read through this the cover-up article in the guardian the bulk of it basically goes through a whole lot of a whole lot of
00:17:34
Speaker
essentially attacking this idea of the epidemiological evidence, which is the basis for the cooking oil theory. So the official theory says that epidemiology shows that everyone who got sick had consumed this
00:17:49
Speaker
tainted oil. People who didn't consume the oil didn't get sick, therefore must have been the oil. And Waffenden's article basically goes through a bunch of cases where he claims that actually that isn't true. There are plenty of people who did get sick who hadn't had any of this cooking oil.
00:18:07
Speaker
and vice versa. He goes through basically a bunch of cases of people who became sick and yet the rest of their family said we didn't ever use any of that sort of oil, we didn't have it in the house, we only ever used proper olive oil, so we couldn't have come from the oil in our case. Even people apparently basically testifying to this in different
00:18:28
Speaker
in different venues, and when being confronted with the fact that, okay, the government, you know, there were reports and studies and what have you done, and this was recorded that you said you did use this oil, and they were basically saying, well, I don't know why the report says that, but I sure as hell didn't.
00:18:44
Speaker
So just to give you one example of this, again to quote from the article, even more amazing was the study concerning a convent outside Madrid. According to this, 42 out of 43 nuns fell ill after using the oil, while visitors whose food was prepared in a different oil did not fall ill. From an official perspective, the beauty of this epidemiology was not just that it provided gameset and match for the oil theory, but that no one could afterwards check the recity of the paper. This was a closed convent.
00:19:12
Speaker
The nuns had no routine contact with members of the public, and they certainly didn't talk to the media. In the event senior nuns from the convent did give evidence at the trial, their testimony flatly contradicted what was written in the convent report. Of course, all the food was prepared in the same way and cooked in the same oil. In fact, only very few nuns, about eight or nine, suffered any illness. The epidemiological report was a fabrication.
00:19:33
Speaker
So Offenden actually goes so far as to say that the government flat-out lied in the studies that they commissioned in the reporting that was done, that they produced results that said that, again, the epidemiological evidence showed that cooking oil had to have been the cause when they actually knew full well that this was not the case and was simply making up data to fit the conclusion that they liked. Offenden was also critical of government programs around all of this, for example, that oil exchange
00:20:04
Speaker
where you could bring in your tainted oil and get olive oil in exchange, apparently would accept basically any old oil you showed up with, so people could just use it as a way to get rid of crappy old oil that they had lying around to get a nice new supply of olive oil, and the oil that was handed in wasn't kept or tested or anything like that.
00:20:24
Speaker
Another thing was that there was a scheme for getting compensation. But in order to get the compensation, you had to be on the government's list of like officially recorded victims. And the only people who would be put on the list were people who had said that yes, they had used tainted cooking oil. So there was an incentive for people to say that they had used the oil, even if they actually hadn't, if they wanted to get compensation.
00:20:47
Speaker
Now, to make things even more conspiratorial, the Waffenden article also mentions other cases, apart from Dr. Murau, of people getting fired for questioning the official story. So a couple of years after all of this, in 1983, there were still questions about exactly what had gone down, and so the Spanish government set up an inquiry into the illnesses headed by doctors Javier Martinez Ruiz and Maria Clavera Ortiz, apparently husband and wife.
00:21:14
Speaker
which isn't super relevant, but interesting, who often in quotes is saying, we absolutely believed the oil was to blame. We thought the only problem was that the information was disorganized and the research inadequate. So they set about investigating so that they could actually get all of the right information in one place, present it properly, and actually prove the official story. However, when they started investigating for themselves,
00:21:39
Speaker
they showed that the distribution of the foreign oil didn't match the distribution of cases. There were places where a lot of this supposedly tainted oil had been sold that didn't produce any illnesses. When they went back and investigated the timeline of cases, they showed that
00:22:00
Speaker
The drop-off in cases actually started sometime before the government made their announcement, telling everybody to stop using the oil, which again was part of the evidence. The government told people, hey, cooking oil could be poisonous. Make sure you're using proper olive oil. And then the cases, the case numbers go down markedly. But apparently, according to these doctors, the case numbers were already starting to go down. So in fact, the announcement that it was cooking oil hadn't had any effect.
00:22:28
Speaker
Now apparently these two doctors having announced their findings were fired from the inquest and the inquest itself was eventually shut down when it was found that even without the two doctors who were leading it they were still able to
00:22:44
Speaker
potentially produce results. Similarly, the government at around the time of the outbreak had created the post of Secretary of State for Consumer Affairs at Cabinet level, and a man called Enrique Martinez de Janique was appointed to this position.
00:23:00
Speaker
who then set about doing his own research on what was going on. And he also concluded that there was no correlation between where the oil was actually being sold and where cases were popping up. And when he presented his findings to the House Ministry, he was also fired.
00:23:16
Speaker
So all of this together means that the Waffenden article is saying in fairly uncertain terms that there was a conspiracy to cover up the true cause of these illnesses and deaths.
Official Support & Ongoing Debate
00:23:31
Speaker
There was a conspiracy that was done specifically to aid the Spanish
00:23:36
Speaker
economy and and bolster the spanish government's position that people knowingly lied about an event that was responsible for a a shocking number of hospitalizations and injuries and deaths and that is the conspiracy theory so
00:23:54
Speaker
So what can we conclude here? Everything happened in 1981. This article came out in 2001. As far as I'm aware, the official version of events is still the accepted version of events. The conspiracy theory never seemed to get any legs. And I guess the main problem with the conspiracy theory is that there's not a lot of evidence for it.
00:24:18
Speaker
Now, like I say, the article spends a lot of time attacking the official story's evidence, this epidemiological evidence for their case and saying that the official version's evidence is wanting, but it doesn't provide a lot of evidence
00:24:34
Speaker
for its own. The organophosphates thing comes about because one doctor said initially that these cases look like organophosphate poisoning, and the other doctors believed that it was actually tomatoes that could potentially have been contaminated with organophosphates that caused it. But there was no hard evidence of this.
00:24:58
Speaker
The other thing about it is it's just an article in The Guardian. It's not a scientific paper. It has no citations or sources or anything that backs any of it up. It's just a whole bunch of claims that this happened and that happened. This was false. That wasn't true. This person said that.
00:25:17
Speaker
And there's no real, it doesn't really ever say exactly where Waffenden's getting a lot of this information from, which is also frustrating. So much as there's no evidence to show how the cooking oil
00:25:34
Speaker
could have actually poisoned people. There's no evidence that shows any of these victims were actually poisoned by organophosphates. But then, of course, the conspiracy theory argument goes, well, of course there weren't, because the government was quite specifically not testing for that. There was an accepted theory at the time of what was going wrong, so why would anyone have been testing for something
00:25:56
Speaker
that was apparently had nothing to do with the cause and something which if you believe the conspiracy theory the government would have been doing its standards to make sure nobody looked into. So all in all there's a there's a distinct lack of of of smoking gun type evidence on both sides for both the official theory and the conspiracy theory and all we have is
00:26:20
Speaker
accusations from the conspiracy theory that the official theory's epidemiological evidence on which it rests entirely is not just wrong but flat out fraudulent. So it really comes down to who do you believe, I guess. Now, the big who
00:26:35
Speaker
in this story is, of course, the actual WHO, the WHO, the World Health Organization. Now, and to this day, they state that the outbreak was caused by cooking oil, although if you go and look on the WHO's website and see the articles they have about it, the articles will all mention
00:26:53
Speaker
that although according to them it is clear and undisputedly true from the epidemiological evidence that cooking oil was the cause of these illnesses, they do all say that but we don't actually know how and that testing that we thought would show how this could have been poisonous in fact did not.
00:27:14
Speaker
So if there were a conspiracy, either not only was the Spanish government in the World Health Organization was in on it as well, or you could say perhaps I guess that they were simply happy to take the Spanish government at their word and had no real interest.
00:27:29
Speaker
at looking into the other theories. And so there you have it. An interesting and interesting case, I think. An interesting case where you have a very clear official theory versus a conspiracy theory. So all of those people who like to talk about how conspiracy theories are reposed to official ones would be right at home here. And unfortunately, one at the end of the day, that doesn't seem to be anything to it. Now, like I say, if you read that article in The Guardian,
00:27:56
Speaker
that does seem like something of a slam dunk, but that's literally all there is. Everything I've told you about the conspiracy theory version of events came from this article because I could not find any other references that any of this information might have come from, and any official reports around it all start from the idea that the official version is the correct version.
00:28:18
Speaker
there you go, an interesting case nonetheless, I think.
Episode Wrap-up & Future Outlook
00:28:22
Speaker
So, once again, all things going to plan. Next week we'll be back with a regular episode, me and Em together again, only not together on the other side of the planet, but that hasn't stopped us in the past. So until then, I think there's nothing left for me to say, but I'll see you all next week one way or another, and goodbye.
00:28:45
Speaker
The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor M.R.X. Stentors. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember,
00:29:13
Speaker
Nothing is real. Everything is permitted. But conditions apply.