Following the mass poisoning of hundreds of people in Spain in 1981, there has been a growing consensus among the public that the official explanation provided by the government just doesn’t add up. Many theories have been thrown around as to the real cause of it. While some blame experiments carried out at a nearby American military base for spreading contamination through the wind, a larger body of evidence is now pointing the finger at a cover-up by multinational chemical companies with blood on their hands, and not the government’s official cause of toxic olive oil poisoning.
Our story begins on the outskirts of Madrid, Spain in 1981. An eight year old boy is rushed to hospital with serious flu-like symptoms. His condition rapidly deteriorates and he dies before even reaching the hospital. On learning that his siblings are starting to present with the same symptoms, doctors begin treating them for atypical pneumonia. Yet within a few days, with hundred of more people being admitted to hospital with difficulty breathing, vomiting, nausea and a build up of fluid in the lungs, they soon realize that they are dealing with something far serious than pneumonia.
As the cause of this mysterious illness becomes a national headline, panic grips the country, with 600 people already sick, no known cause, no idea if it’s contagious, or how many more may become ill. Some in the medical community are at a loss, but one doctor in charge of the cases at Madrid’s main hospital theorizes that it is a case of wide spread food poisoning. He becomes convinced of this idea as he notices that all of his patients are from the poor apartment blocks in the towns and villages that surround the capital. He has also noticed that these communities are served by a black market where produce and foodstuffs are sold. One thing that catches his eye are cans of olive oil sold at prices vastly cheaper than he has ever seen before. On questioning patients, all admit to having purchase the oil. He make several purchases of the oil and takes them to private labs for analysis.
Bad Olive Oil?
Another doctor is no so convinced of the tainted oil theory. During a newspaper interview, the head of the endocrinology department at La Paz hospital pointed out that the illness matched organo-phosphates poisoning. One day after the interview, he is visited by officials from the state health department and he is instructed to not make any more statements about organo-phosphates. Other doctors are relived of their duties as the government takes full control of the situation and issues a statement that the official cause of the outbreak is tainted olive oil.
There was only one problem with the government’s explanation of the illness – it did not account for the fact that some patients with the disease insisted that they never consumed any of the cooking oil. One women, who was to later die of the toxic oil syndrome, pointed out that her family owned their own olive tree and they made their own oil. She therefore had no reason to purchase the cheap oil from the markets. Adding to the confusion of the disease, it now seemed to be expanding beyond the poor villages. Some wealthy people were beginning to become ill as well, people wealthy enough that they were unlikely to frequent the markets that the tainted oil was sold in. There was also a number of patients who presented with the disease weeks before the outbreak began. What could explain their illness?
Records were systematically destroyed or not kept in the first place
Efforts to get to the bottom of the outbreak had been hampered at every step by the Spanish government. A long three months after the outbreak began, the government finally instituted an exchange program where citizens could trade the oil in their cupboards for new olive oil that was guaranteed to be free of contamination. Yet during this exchange program, no effort was made to keep any records of who was returning oil. They were not asked their names, what area they lived in or if they had purchased any of the oil in question. Nor were they asked if they or anyone in their household had become ill. This made later investigations virtually impossible, as researchers could not correlate the data to draw a definitive link between the olive oil and the illness.
Samples of the olive oil that had been collected by one doctor at local markets were later found to be free of toxins. Although the olive oil was adulterated with rapeseed oil, a close cousin of canola oil, it did not contain anything that could make people so sick. After all, how is olive oil bad for you? The government’s response to this? They fired him. In fact, the government seemed to be going out of it’s way to sabotage any investigative effort to find real the cause of this disease. It became overly selective in the records it decided to keep. For instance, if someone had the illness, they were asked if they had consumed the oil. If they admitted they did, their name was added to the list of victims of the disease (and they were then eligible to collect state compensation). If a patient said they did not consume the oil, their name was not added to the list and their symptoms were simply disregarded as some other illness. The government was clearly determined that people believe that this was a case of food poisoning, and officials seemed unwilling to accept any other possibility.
Toxic Oil Syndrome
So what about the organo-phosphates as the cause of the outbreak? As far as symptoms went, they were the only cause that fit with any certainty. The two doctors fired by the Spanish government had interviewed close to 5,000 people in the neighborhoods most heavily affected by the toxic oil syndrome. The one thing they found in common between everyone sick was not one brand of cooking oil, but rather tomatoes. The tomatoes came from a region of Spain called Almeria which had only recently become agriculturally productive following the discovery of underground water. Due to poor conditions in the area, farming was only possible through the use of large quantities of chemical fertilizers and pesticides which included the newly introduced organo-phosphate group. Since this was a very poor and illiterate area of the country, the doctors theorized that a crop of tomatoes had been harvested too early after spraying with these chemicals, or simply too much of the chemical had been applied. Since the farmers were illiterate, and many were new to farming techniques that incorporated such chemicals, their theory sounded like a valid one. Adding greater credibility to their theory was the fact that organo-phosphates position was a better match for the symptoms victims were suffering from.
So if there was a cover up as to the real cause of this tragedy, who was it orchestrated by and what did they have to gain by it. Many now believe the chemical poisoning of the tomatoes was the real cause of the syndrome and point to a conspiracy by multinational chemical companies. Organo-phosphates had only recently been introduced and a lot of money could be lost if the farming community did not embrace them. If it came to light that these new chemicals were behind a public health catastrophe, it is unlikely that they would be adopted and may actually be banned from use. It has been alleged that the chemical industry bribed government officials to be complacent with this conspiracy. But due to the poor record keeping, it is unlikely that we will never know for sure the real reason of the disease. Despite ongoing monitoring of the survivors and attempts to replicate the tainted cooking oil in the lab, researches have not been able to definitively pin the cause on the cooking oil.