Day 106 - 23 Mar 95 - Page 08
1 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
2 A. I approached these statistics with some diffidence. It
3 is part of my pH study, PhD study, to get behind the
4 statistics and look at how they have been accumulated and
5 how they are drawn up. Frankly, the bulk of statistics we
6 deal with have large elements of uncertainty and
7 inaccuracies within them. Some of them lie almost entirely
8 within the realms of fiction. So, one has to treat all
9 statistics related to food poisoning with salmonellosis
10 with some caution.
11
12 MR. JUSTICE BELL: When you say "within the realm of fiction",
13 how does that come about?
14 A. In the absence of firm data, sometimes they are made up
15 vis. the under-reporting. That is pure invention.
16
17 Q. Are you saying they are made up, that is just guesswork?
18 A. It is totally guesswork without any scientific
19 foundation whatsoever. Others are approximations based on
20 extremely limited scientific data.
21
22 Q. So the one in 10 or one in 100 is guesswork, is it?
23 A. My Lord, it is pure guesswork. In fact, I think I take
24 some credence for inventing the one in 10 because some
25 years ago we had to write a textbook, myself and a
26 colleague, and it was a common question in hygiene exams as
27 to what do you estimate the true incidence of salmonella to
28 be.
29
30 So, we invented the figure one in 10 so that students who
31 sometimes had a limited grasp of mathematics could take the
32 actual recorded incidence and add a nought to it and give
33 an estimate. It might sound crude. It is crude. This
34 uncertainty has dogged the authorities for many years. It
35 was for that reason that the Department of Health currently
36 is funding a survey. It is costing a half a million -- no,
37 sorry, two million, to actually try to estimate a true
38 incidence.
39
40 Q. Is there any reliable soundly based guide for me at all?
41 A. The only guide of -----
42
43 Q. For generations people with hangovers have been trying
44 to explain it away by saying it must have been something in
45 the fish I ate, and so on. Is that the sort of problem
46 one has?
47 A. It is an enormous problem, my Lord; even the laboratory
48 recorded figures are subject to major errors. The only
49 thing we have anywhere near reliable is the actual
50 laboratory confirmed figures which represent actual
51 laboratory specimens tested in which salmonella has been
52 isolated, but even then over the past five years they have
53 changed the recording system three times.
54
55 Q. This is not to steer Mr. Morris away from the matter -- he
56 may want to ask you more -- but can you say more than that,
57 one's experience of the world would tell one that for every
58 incidence of laboratory confirmed food poisoning, there are
59 likely to be many others, perhaps milder perhaps not, which
60 do not get near a doctor, let alone a laboratory? Can you
