Proceedings of the XLVI Italian Society of Agricultural Genetics - SIGA Annual Congress

Giardini Naxos, Italy - 18/21 September, 2002

ISBN 88-900622-3-1

Round Table Abstract - RT1

ON THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE

BATTAGLIA F.

Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma-Tre

Recently, the precautionary principle has been invoked in favour of certain policies concerning the protection of health and the environment. I think that this principle should be rejected for the reasons that follow. Please note that precaution itself is an important and incontestable measure, which should be taken in every human activity. But the precautionary principle, as an attempt to turn precaution into a legal procedure, seems to have been a failure that is not just unhelpful, but harmful as well.

The precautionary principle may be formulated in the words of article 15 of the Rio Declaration of 1992:

“Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation”.

The vacuity of this principle is self-evident to those who do not have a scientific background: scientific certainty cannot exist. Actually, this was noted by the EU Commission which tried – grasping at straws and creating rather than solving problems – to justify and limit the enforceability of this principle rather than repealing it altogether. At any rate, according to the EU Commission report, a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to invoking (not to applying yet!) the principle is that risks must have been singled out: the assumption that they exist is not enough.

As I pointed out, “scientific certainty” is always missing, since doubt is in the very nature of science. The risk of the precautionary principle is that the space for doubt is filled by arbitrary assertions which could give voice only to those scientific results that are convenient for particular agendas, and allow the rationalisation of private interests that are in open conflict with broader collective interests, and with the critical analysis of the sum of scientific acquisitions. And the step from arbitrary assertion to (false) certainty is quite short. Let us examine some cases where the precautionary principle has been invoked inappropriately.

1. In Silent Spring, the environmentalists’ bible, written by Rachael Carson a little less than 50 years ago, DDT was marked as an “elixir of death.” In 1948, two million people died of malaria in Ceylon; this declined to only 31 cases in 1962 -- thanks to DDT. Since DDT’s abolition in the name, let’s say, of an “ante litteram” precautionary principle, millions of people have been infected with malaria.

2. In the late 1970s, the method for processing bovine carcasses in order to make a proteic alimentary integrator was altered. While the older method of processing destroyed prions, the new method was unable to do so. There is actually nothing wrong in using butcher’s rejects to make a proteic feed -- even though the carcasses of ill animals should not have been used. In order to separate water and fat, rejects were converted into pulp, then heated to 130°C and treated with an organic solvent to melt the fats away. There could not be a better choice than dichlorinemethane, which would have allowed the production of fat and feed without the infection of prion, which was destroyed in the process.

However, some people attacked dichlorinemethane, using two arguments. The first one -- rather peculiar -- sustained that, since CFCs (containing chlorine atoms bound to one atom of carbon) destroyed the ozone, then dichlorinemethane (which also contains two atoms of chlorine bound to one of carbon) might have had the same effect. The second argument was based on a scientific publication that reported an increase in cancer rates in mice exposed to dichlorinemethane (those mice were genetically modified so to be particularly susceptible to tumours). British firms were induced to abandon dichlorinemethane and to use a procedure that, without the use of solvents, treated carcasses at only 80°C, and then pressed them. With this process, the prion was left unaltered, and it could pass on from feed to cows. Now we know – poor comfort it is! -- that dichlorinemethane is not carcinogenic and, because of light and oxygen, it oxidises and decomposes quickly without damaging the ozone. To affirm that “mad cow” came from, once again, an inappropriate use of an “ante litteram” precautionary principle, is not far from the truth.

3. As we all know, water chlorination is, perhaps, the most effective way to purify drinking water. A small concentration of hypochlorite is sufficient to keep the water free from pathogenic germs that are dangerous to health. Perhaps chlorinated water is not the tastiest water, but we have to choose between either a crystalline taste or dangerous germs. The war on the water chlorination process was declared at the end of the 1980s, thanks to the usual scientific article that hypothesised about the risk that water chlorination could carry. According to the piece, chlorination, presumably, transformed the organic residues of the water into organochlorites that – again, presumably – could facilitate the appearance of tumours. Notwithstanding that both the IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) and the WHO published in 1991 a report stating that there was insufficient evidence for alarm and that, at any rate, the risk hypothesised needed to be compared with the established risk of non–chlorinated water, the Peruvian government, listening to environmentalists rather than to IARC and WHO, decided in the same year to suspend the chlorination of drinking water. The result was a cholera epidemic that affected one million people and killed ten thousand.

4. Today, the precautionary principle has been explicitly invoked to apply the Kyoto Protocol to counter global warming and the resulting climate change. Without any doubt, global warming poses questions that are still unanswered about the causes, the effects, and what measures to take, if any. The enforcement of the Kyoto Protocol means offering an answer to the global warming question: however, the acceptance of an inadequate answer discourages the search for the right one. Specifically, we know that, even assuming there is a need to counter a presumed ever-growing global warming, the carbon dioxide emission reduction foreseen by Kyoto would have zero effect on global warming. We should reduce CO2 by 80% to hope to obtain, after several decades, some kind of irrelevant effect. On the other hand, we would have to deal with disastrous consequences on the economies of industrialised countries.

5. The precautionary principle was invoked when a moratorium on depleted uranium bullets was called for. In order to prevent the scandal, it would have been sufficient to note that uranium goes through alfa-decay, that it has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, and that IARC puts it in the same class as tea as far as its carcinogenic effects are concerned. Moreover, it is naturally present in the earth crust with a concentration ranging from 1 to 10 mg/kg. For example, in the first 20 cm of the earth crust around Milan (an area which is rich in uranium) – and for a surface equal to Kosovo – the quantity of uranium is ten thousand times greater than what has been produced with the shooting of bullets. Perhaps there should rather be a moratorium on wars.

6. The precautionary principle has been invoked to ban agrobiotechnological products without realizing that any potential risk is not in the technology itself, but must be identified on a case-by-case basis. And this has been done without realising that a protection from biotechnological products was irrationally invoked – a protection that was far greater than that expected for traditional products. Furthermore, it was not realised that the precautionary principle was not invoked for biological products, although the risks for those products are ascertained, and can result in damage: in the absence of pesticides applied by the cultivator, a biological vegetable may spontaneously produce natural pesticides in quantities so high to become toxic. It has happened.

7. The last case – the most glaring, limited, though, within Italy – of an inappropriate call for the precautionary principle (with consequent damages) is that of so-called electrosmog. Concerning electromagnetic fields, one must distinguish the radio-frequency ones from the power-frequency ones. For the former, every epidemiological study has concluded that the risk factor for exposure vs. non-exposure is even less than one: from a superficial reading of these data, one would conclude that those fields are beneficial to health! Thus, for radio frequency fields not only the conditions for application do not exist, but either those to even invoke the precautionary principle, since no risk has been singled-out.

Nevertheless the Italian protection regulations – which are unique in the world, and which have been written on behalf of the precautionary principle - have been responsible for ten months of the six-year delay on the installation of the Linate-airport radar. Those very regulations foresee particularly low fields when in proximity of structures that are considered at risk, such as schools and hospitals. Those who wanted those regulations must be held morally co-responsible for the disaster that occurred at the Linate airport in October 2001, as well as the 19 deaths in the fire of the building for disabled near Salerno, where the nurses could not call for help using their cellular phones, since the field was insufficiently powerful.

Concerning the power-frequency fields, the situation stands as follows: the only risk that has been singled-out (but not either found or ascertained!) concerns the doubled risk for child leukaemia for exposure to 50-60-Hz magnetic fields higher than half microtesla. The lay person gets alarmed when he hears of a risk that is “doubled”. But in order to appreciate the real meaning of “doubling” the risk, one must appreciate that even those who buy two lottery tickets double their chance of winning as compared to those who buy only one ticket! One must also appreciate that a normal smoker risks cancer not twice, but twenty times more than those who do not smoke.

IARC appreciates this reality – to the point that the power-frequency magnetic fields are classified in the third class for risk of cancer, together with coffee and pickled vegetables. The electric component of the industrial frequency fields has been classified in the fourth class together with tea, while smoking is in the first class. Even the WHO appreciates this reality, and suggests a protective value of 100 microtesla. This value, states the WHO, guarantees safety when not exceeded, but it does not necessarily imply risk if exceeded.

At any rate, even assuming that we can eliminate the number of people exposed to fields of excess of half microtesla, how many children would be actually “saved?” A quick estimation is easy. Each year, in Italy, about 400 children get leukaemia, while the population exposed to fields greater than a half microtesla equals 0.3% of the total. By setting the equation

400 = 0.997 y + 2 . 0.003 y

(where 2 is the double risk factor for exposure) by resolving for y, and substituting we have (approximation to integer values) 400 = 398 + 2. Out of those 400 children, 399 got leukaemia for reasons other than electromagnetic fields. What about the last one? Can anyone say that the fields have caused him (or hers) leukaemia? Of course not. One could claim that only if the fields were be a risk – and that has not yet been ascertained, after 20 years of research and 20,000 papers. But even if the power lines were buried, could we say that we have eliminated that single, hypothetical case? No, because at 20 meters away from a power line the magnetic field is still comparable to the one in every house because of the presence of appliances.

According to a WHO report, a continuous exposure to benzene (which is a certified cause for leukaemia) within the legal limits, that is, 10 micrograms/cubic meter, would cause an increase of 2,500 leukaemia cases in Italy. To invoke the precautionary principle in order to eliminate a (presumed) cause for leukaemia while there is an ascertained one which is 2,500 times greater, is scientifically unsound. The only real effect of a legislation that designed -- in the name of the precautionary principle -- to combat the nonexistent electrosmog, has been to enrich those corporations – more or less private – that measure the electromagnetic fields in cities, and those companies that ensure compliance to the law, by burying the transmission lines, for instance. Incidentally, it is not necessary to measure electromagnetic fields, since physics provide us with the equations to calculate the value of the fields once the sources are known. The business value of measuring fields has been estimated of 50 billion euros (about 50 billion dollars).

I close with a thought and a proposal. First, it should be kept in mind that risk assessment and management can be handled according to the scientific method, and it is for this very reason I believe that the precautionary principle should be repealed, as it is intended to bypass a scientifically-based risk assessment and management. It is also necessary to stress that, when it is possible to obtain answers by means of the scientific method, those answers must be entrusted to the committees of organisations which are scientifically accredited, as well as officially recognised, and that are independent from any financial interest that might concern the issue which is examined. Otherwise, the real risk is that the laws of physics and the books of medicine are rewritten first in parliaments, and later in courtrooms.

And now my proposal. I’m proposing here the following reformulation of the precautionary principle, to be compared with the current formulation, given at the beginning of this article:

“Where there are scientifically proved threats of serious or irreversible damage, policy makers cannot postpone cost-effective and risk-proportionate measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

I would call the above the (triple) “priority principle.” The first priority is that of scientific analysis over emotional concerns, i.e., the adoption of a scale of priorities which takes the cost/benefit ratio into account. The second priority is that the reason of science over political reasoning. The third and final priority is the protection of the environment over economic interests.