Acid Test: When we pay for their mistakes
By Matt Ridley
Copyright 1999 The Daily Telegraph (London)
25th January 1999

DO PRESSURE groups make it harder for governments to admit mistakes? Suppose a law is enacted or a policy announced based on evidence that seems to make sense. But then the evidence is shown to be flawed. Is the law repealed or the policy revoked? The heck it is. By then, the policy has its vested momentum for pressure groups; too many jobs and dignities depend on it.

There is an example currently winding through Brussels. In 1991, the European Commission brought forward a directive that all drinking water should have less than 50 milligrams per litre of nitrates in it. Everybody from the Chief Medical Officer to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution said this was bonkers, because all the evidence pointed to more than twice that concentration being entirely safe. Besides, the main danger from nitrates - a disease called blue-baby syndrome - was (a) extinct and (b) easily cured.

But the directive came into force anyway, and last year the European Commission set about making it even tighter. It is about to enforce "nitrate-vulnerable zones" where farmers would be forbidden fertiliser, and ground water would be treated before being used for drinking. Never mind that these measures would ruin farmers across the Continent and cost the water industry nearly £200 million in this country alone to obey. Never mind that they would actually require the lowering of natural nitrate levels in some places. Make way: the directive must get through.

Until last year there was the ghost of a justification: excess nitrates just might cause cancer, though no study proved they did. But then even this excuse evaporated when it became apparent that cancer was associated with low dietary nitrate, not high nitrate. So the directive was actually bad for health.

IN November last year, a man called Alan Monckton wrote to Grant Lawrence of the European Commission pointing all this out and adding: "I assume you have now read the medical research to which I alerted you, and now know the facts on this. I also note that, as you confirmed to me, DG XI has no medical expertise; so you should not be promoting a directive which, due to medical ignorance, includes serious consequences for public health."

There was, of course, no reply. To cancel a nitrate directive would bring the wrath of the Green movement on the Commission's head, which would be less comfortable than damaging people's health with faulty directives.

Environmental policy is bedevilled by mistaken judgments that were framed in good faith but turn out to be based on faulty science. Global warming is one: the rush to judge carbon dioxide the chief culprit before the sun's role was understood put policy makers far out on a limb, and they dare not retreat lest they lose face (or job). Falling sperm counts may be another mistake in the making. As James Le Fanu points out in a new book*, many studies find that sperm counts are rising, not falling; the original report that they are falling is based on a faulty conflation of different studies that used different criteria and different methods in different places and are as comparable as chalk and cheese.

In the same book, a powerful case is made that the rush to ban DDT in the 1970s has killed far more people (through the resurgence of malaria) than it saved. Banning DDT was a luxury we in the malaria-free North could afford to save birds and otters (so I am glad we did), but imposing it on the Third World bore a heavy cost in death and misery for people there - a cost that should be on our consciences. Properly used, DDT has never damaged human health; yet two million people die of malaria each year, 90 per cent of them Africans. When will our governments and the pressure groups that drive them learn to say: "Sorry - we were wrong"?

* Environmental Health: Third World Problems - First World Preoccupations. Edited by Lorraine Mooney and Roger Bate. Butterworth-Heinemann, £30.