Don

Mail on Sunday, 14th December

I lost my girlfriend and my career and almost lost my mind – because of a chemical used in fish farms: Was the life of a bright young student destroyed by poisons that were used every day in the mass production of fish for human consumption?

By Fidelma Cook

[Photo: Fighting back: after years of suffering without knowing the cause, James Findlay is taking legal action over the fish farm incident that he believes destroyed his health]

At 28, James Findlay thought life couldn’t be sweeter.  Quietly spoken with a natural courtesy and charm he had acquired a growing reputation as a knowledgeable and committed expert in fish management.  About to take up a post as a Government fisheries officer, which guaranteed him a lifetime close to the sea and rivers he loved, he had taken a temporary job as deputy manager at a Highland company farming trout.  It was a job, he now says with cold, controlled anger, that was the start of a descent into a hell in which he feared he was losing his mind.  It would cost him his family, his future wife, his career and his self-respect as he scored heroin on the streets to ease his physical and mental torment.Today, almost 13 years later, Mr Findlay, his lawyers and a growing body of medical experts are preparing to go to court to show how a controversial but routinely applied pesticide in the fish and general farming industry destroyed his life.  They will claim that a ‘five-second accident’ in which he was doused with a compound of organophosphates, used to kill sea lice in fish bound for human consumption, so profoundly physically and mentally altered the former Glasgow University economics student that his future was wiped out. 

His case, one of the worse in hundreds if not thousands allegedly affected by organophosphates (OPs) in the UK, is only the tip of an iceberg of culpability, say scientists and medics, which successive governments refuse to acknowledge.  Farmers, Gulf War soldiers and even children who have been given head lice treatment have all been potential victims of the powerful pesticide which was first warned about back in the Fifties.  Some opponents even suggest that the pesticide could have been responsible for BSE in cattle.  If successful in his claim, which could amount to tens of thousands of pounds, Mr Findlay could open the floodgates to others who, despite worldwide studies backing their claims, have been denied any redress against the chemical ind ustry, government and employees.   

Professor Malcolm Hooper, emeritus professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Sunderland and Chief Scientific Advisor to the Gulf Veterans Association said last week: “I have no doubt James Findlay has suffered severe damage from his exposure and he continues to pay a very big price for it in his personal health.  I have met and studied him and am prepared to go to court on his behalf.  James is a victim of government compromise which states interest in the subject but cannot afford to acknowledge all the evidence coming.  It all comes down to commerce and cash and, as far as I’m concerned, the chemical industry is being protected by government”. 

Such backing is wonderful to hear for a man who spent ten years trying to get an answer to his problems.  But it doesn’t further a cure.  “The medical prognosis is not exactly cheerful”, said Mr Findlay last week as he sat in his tiny council house in Inverness, a resigned, wry smile flickering across his face.  “My once very high IQ has been reduced by neuropsychologists to below average and I appear to have a form of autism when confronted with facts and figures and rapid analysis.  I already have creeping paralysis and face total paralysis, further brain deterioration including dementis, numerous potential cancers, rapid aging of the cells and, of course, early death.   I live with depression, irratibility, allergies, food intolerances, chronic pain and fatigue alongside tremors, panic attacks – you name it.  Most painful of all, I have been told that I am sterile.  I will never have the child or children I’d hoped for.  It is just as well, because all the evidence suggests that if I did father a child the chances of genetic abnormalities would be incredibly high.  Once I had a life of real promise.  Is it any wonder that I expect someone, some company, some multinational to apologize and ultimately to pay for this?”

The accident Mr Findlay refers to as ‘the end of my world’ happened on May 28, 1990.  Already disturbed at the lax conditions he had found at the Cromarty Salmon Company, he was unhappy to be told he would have to ‘delouse’ the cages more than a mile out in the Firth.  Given a slight, protective mask and wearing overalls, he watched as a mix of Aquaguard SLT, an organophosphate compound, was added to a bucket of water and he was then shown how to sluice it over the trout cages moored in the Cromarty Firth.  As he did so, the bucket slipped in his hand and its contents went all over his head, face, shoulders and upper body.  “I felt an immediate burning sensation and I wretched the mask off, shoving my head forwa rd to stop anything running into my mouth.  The manager, Brian Shaw, grabbed me and tried to wash my face with the cage water which was already contaminated with the compound.  I ran to another part of the farm and washed myself with fresh water.  I was aware I was light-sensitive and my eyes were burning, my shoulders seemed heavy.  I was disorientated, I felt like I was floating.  I knew I had to get ashore.”

[Graphic: Organophosphates poison sign – Deadly poison: the danger of working with organophosphates are well known]

Three-and-a-half hours after the accident, Mr Findlay was admitted to hospital 20 minutes away in Inverness, where he was treated as a case of severe OP poisoning and given antidote.  He was sent home after 24 hours’ observation and his boss gave him the rest of the week off.  Despite still feeling under par, Mr Findlay worked on until other safety incidents at the farm disturbed him enough to quit before the end of this three-month contract.  Taking up his fisheries job in the Clyde Basin, in Ayr, he thought no more about the accident.  “It should have been the start of an amazing part of my life but I was a different man from the one they hired,” he now says, barely audible.  “I’d travelled the world before finally settling.  I loved meeting new people and being in new situations.  I’d found the job I wanted and yet I couldn’t seem to make sense of anything around me.  I found it hard to concentrate, even to fill in forms.  I was so irritable that people complained about me, but I didn’t see it.  Instead of relishing what I was doing I felt as if I had this heavy, heavy weight over me, tired all the time, really incapable of lifting a foot.  There were complaints about the loss of memory but I didn’t know what they were talking about.”  Over the next four years he tried to live an ordinary life, meeting a girl, hoping to marry, whilst battling increasingly bleak depressions.  During that time he visited the doctor on 33 occasions with a mix of symptoms which were finally put down to ‘all in the mind’. 

For some reason the hospital report of his poisoning, seen by the Mail on Sunday, was never transferred to his GP.  “It never occurred to me that what had happened had anything to do with what was happening to me then,” he says.  “I even asked if I had MS or ME.  Relating my family history, it was decided at some point that because of my parents’ divorce and a pretty unhappy background I was finally exhibiting symptoms relating to that.  It seemed possible, with no other answers, and I went into myself – a downward spiral, wondering if that was it.  It was the start of vicious recriminations with my mother and father which are barely healed to this day.  Obviously, if it were mental, no one was going to give me any pain relief.”  Thinking a geographical change would help, Mr Findlay and his girlfriend moved to Kinlochbervie in Sutherland, where he was in charge of all fishing measures and markets.  “I was in the most glorious spot on earth,” he recalled.  “And nothing had changed – I was worse, blacker, feeling I was being ripped apart, going down”.  The girlfriend left him: “I loved her dearly, and she me, but she couldn’t put up with the mood swings and everything else.  Who could blame her?”

By now convinced he was either mad or bad, Mr Findlay lost almost everything.  With his muscles screaming, and painkillers ineffective, he went quickly to the streets to buy heroin and other opiates – taking care only to smoke or swallow, not inject.  The drugs gave temporary relief.  He re-enrolled at university in Paisley for an MSc in industry, but quickly dropped out, unable to cope.  He even sought refuge at a Buddhist monastic centre in the Borders, battling his addiction as a trainee monk in six-month isolation.  Returning to Inverness, he enrolled in an addiction centre.  Detailing his life, he almost accidental ly mentioned the incident at the fish farm.  “It was as if a light went on in the counsellor’s eyes”, he says now.  “He asked me more and more questions.  Strangely, 24 hours later, a pamphlet was put through the door of the place I was staying, detailing the symptoms of OP poisoning.  It was like a light going on, I felt sick, disgusted, you name it.  Suddenly, after all those years, here was a reason for all that had happened to me”. 

Mr Findlay contacted his local MSP, organophosphate action groups, and signed himself in to a borders hospital to wean himself off any lingering addictions.  His hospital record detailing the incident suddenly appeared in his medical files for the first time.  He also began the first steps in suing the fish farm company, which was dissolved in 1999.  “I’ve had one drug relapse in the last three years,” he admitted.  “I know that every bit of dirt possible will be thrown at me.  But I will argue I turned to drugs only because there was no other way to ease the pains I lived with and the mental torment I was put through.  Today I’m on the prescribed opiates no one would give for me for ten, 11 years.  All the tests are there, showing the level of organophosphates still in my body”.  Facing an uncertain future, James Findlay, could be belligerently antagonistic as he tells his story.  Instead, he repeatedly apologises for his lapses in concentration, difficult for a boy who was Highland Schools Debating Champion, a champion school athlete and rugby player.  He hesitantly talks of his new girlfriend Mandy Spear, and says: “I feel more than anything the wonderful benefit of finally knowing that happened to me.  For once, I am not alone”. 

Useful Dichlorvos (Aquaguard or also known as Nuvan) links:

“Insecticide ban amid cancer fears” (BBC News, 19th April 2002): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1939569.stm

“Ministers act over a range of insecticides containing dichlorvos” (HSE/DEFRA/DEH/DETR, 19th April 2002): http://www.hse.gov.uk/press/2002/e02076.htm

“Worker sues fish farm over testicular cancer link” (Sunday Business Post, 10th March 2002): http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2002/03/10/story315882.asp

http://list.zetnet.co.uk/pipermail/seatrout-rev/2002-March/000116.html

“Dichlorvos dossier: salmon farmers’ toxic time-bomb” (January 2002): http://list.zetnet.co.uk/pipermail/seatrout-rev/2002-January/000059.html

“Fly spray ban urged as cancer fears rise” (The Sunday Herald, 20th January 2002):

http://www.iatp.org/foodsec/News/news.cfm?News_ID=1705

“Cancer scare over fly spray used by millions” (The Daily Mail, 15th December 2001): http://list.zetnet.co.uk/pipermail/seatrout-rev/2002-January/000058.html

“The horrors of intensive salmon farming” (The Ecologist, June 2001): http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m2465/5_31/76285487/p3/article.jhtml?term=

“Cancer rise may be linked to farm chemicals” (Reuters, 16th October 1998):

http://131.104.232.9/agnet/1998/10-1998/ag-10-16-98-1.txt

“Cancers blamed on land chemicals” (BBC News, 1st October 1998):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/184215.stm

“Students paid to eat organophosphates” (The Guardian, 30th July 1998):

http://www.mad-cow.org/aug98_news.html#ddd