Spanish cooking oil toll ‘may be 3000’

Press, 28 October 1981, Page 35

Spanish cooking oil toll ‘may be 3000’

by

ETHAN BRONNER,

NZPA Reuter Madrid Spaniards who have consumed toxic cooking oil may well be the victims of 'an extraordinary biological process in which the body destroys itself out of confusion, and which could end in death for thousands of them, according to researchers in Madrid. Chief scientists at many of Madrid’s research hospitals have-agreed on a possible explanation for what is regarded world wide as an unprecedented condition, and are highly pessimistic that any cure can be found soon. Instead, they say, the death toll could easily reach 2000 to 3000. ' “The > only hope, I see for these poor people is that we are wrong,” said Professor Gertrudis de la Fuente, one of Spain’s leading chemists. So far about 150 people have died and 16,000 are known to have been poisoned by the oil, a'mixture which included rapeseed oil treated for industrial use. The product was sold fraudulently as olive oil door-to-door in poor areas round Madrid and in north-east Spain. Although it is still not clear what the Spanish importer did to the rapeseed oil — the 12 charged in the fraud are involved in pretrial proceedings — it seems-, that they tried to “purify” the oil of analine, a dye added by its French producers to designate it as not for human consumption. The purification process apparently involved heating the oil to 200 deg c for 48 hours. Scientists believe that by so doing the importers unwittingly produced analide, a combination of analine and oil components known as fatty acids. According to the current theory, when the analide was swallowed it was broken down in the liver, a normal process, but one of the products of the break-down was what scientists call a superoxide or free radical. Free radicals are highly reactive molecules which combine with almost anything, there disrupting stable

compounds which make up the walls of the body’s cells. This is what the researchers believe occurred in the first phase of the illness, when patients suffered from fever, nausea, and inflamed lungs. Free radicals normally occur in small quantities in the body which has special compounds to neutralise them. But scientists believe that the oil’s poison has exhausted those compounds. But patients who overcame that phase have returned to hospital suffering from much more serious symptoms — slurred speech, heart malfunctions, and near-total paralysis. Many of those who died recently have been unable to breathe because their chest muscles were so paralysed that they could not expand and contract, according to Dr Antonio Rodriquez Noriega, who was in charge of toxic oil research at one of Spain’s biggest hospitals. The theory accepted by some researchers is that this second phase is the result of the body’s immune system “misunderstanding” the damage done by the free radicals. The body’s antibodies — white blood cells which attack infection and foreign bodies — see the damaged cells, fail to recognise them and attack. In other words, the body’s defence system attacks the very, organs it is there to protect. Professor de la Fuente said such a situation was known to’exist in a local level in rheumatoid arthritis, a stiffening of,, the joints for which there is no known cure. But what makes the toxic oil syndrome so serious is that free .radicals seem to have spread,throughout.the body, affecting .vital organs such as the lungs, heart, brain and muscles. White blood cells are thus attacking the entire body in stages. Moreover, it is possible that only small amounts of the poison are required to set off the self-destruction process, and those who so far have experienced no symptoms may begin to show signs in coming months, doc-

tors say. It is not inconceivable that these victims too will die. Scientists in Madrid emphasise that their theory is just that, a theory, and based on only small amounts of hard evidence. Free radicals live less than a billionth of a second and cannot be traced. Analide, swallowed by the patients, was long ago broken down in their systems and while it seems the likeliest culprit, no researcher can say for sure that it is the cause of the disease. One biologist has taken a picture of a white blood cell attacking muscle tissue in a patient, an abnormality which is in keeping with the theory. The chemistry of muscle cells, which have been hit hardest, helps explain why they would be particularly vulnerable to free radical mutilation. Dr Fernando Ortiz, a leading immunologist, said one complication was that immune systems varied so greatly from person to person that it was extremely difficult to generalise. Foreign scientists have been consulted about the toxic oil syndrome and laboratories in the United States, France, Britain and West Germany have tested blood and tissue samples. But Spanish researchers say so far foreign help has done little good in that the laboratories abroad simply did the same tests, as were performed in Spain. They say the show of foreign help has been mainly aimed at calming political opposition which has blamed the Government for not acting swiftly and efficiently in the health scandal. Dr Noriega said that now was the time to request specific help from abroad on questions of free radical pathology, a very new specialty' ip the medical profession. '■. He said he and his colleagues were preparing a report on their theories and would then contact known experts in the field. But he and others agreed that the immediate prospects for the patients were dim.