Health agency goes bananas

The Health Department has apparently moved on after being ignored by Manny Pacquiao, who went home from his last fight despite a warning not to because of the swine flu scare. Now the department wants to ban the aerial spraying of banana plantations in Davao based on a three-year-old study of a small village that is—to be kind— inconclusive.

But the case of Pacquiao and his retinue, who were apparently correct in assuming that they didn’t have the flu because they didn’t exhibit any of the symptoms, left the department merely with egg on its face. The long-running controversy between the banana growers of the Davao area and the groups that want them to stop spraying fungicide from small airplanes is a lot more important—and something that the Health Department must not wade into if its only motivation is broadcast airtime and newspaper space.

The recommendation of the Health Department to ban aerial spraying in thousands of hectares of banana plantations in and around Davao this week is just the latest development in a case that has pitted the hundred-million-dollar banana export industry against groups of local residents and their NGO backers, who are claiming that the method is endangering public health. The controversy has enmeshed the courts, the local governments and, most recently, two senators who have also called for the ban.

It all started several years back when the Davao City council passed an ordinance banning aerial spraying, leading to the filing of a case in a local court. The Court of Appeals then got into the picture, overturning a lower court decision upholding the ban, on the basis of the lack of a national law that would allow it.

Two senators from Mindanao—Aquilino Pimentel and Juan Miguel Zubiri—weighed in on the matter, as well, supporting the ban in recent statements. In between, both the banana-growing industry and the anti-spraying lobby have traded accusations of wrongdoing and of spreading lies about each other.

It’s actually natural for the department to join the fray, since public health lies at the heart of the controversy. But when it did jump in, the health department only looked almost irredeemably clueless; those who took the trouble to look deeper into the department’s pronouncements (and the study that it used to back up its claims) wondered if the agency had not, in fact, gone completely bananas.

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Last Tuesday in Davao City, the DoH told a crowd of scientists, banana industry members, various non-government organizations and other stakeholders that it was recommending a ban on aerial spraying. To support this stand, the department offered a study made by the Philippine Society of Clinical and Occupational Toxicology and the National Poison Management and Control Center of the University of the Philippines that showed “statistically negligible” levels of fungicide residue detected in the air, soil and water of Sitio Camocaan in Hagonoy, Davao del Sur.

The joint study commissioned by the department was conducted among just 38 residents of the village, which lies beside the banana plantation of the Guihing Agricultural and Development Corp., or Gadeco. The two research groups recommended the ban at the end of their study—even if the conclusion was not consistent with at least five of their official findings, which showed no correlation between the health concerns raised by some village residents and the insignificant levels of supposedly toxic chemicals detected by the researchers there.

The researchers stuck to their conclusion even if they found that a chemical called ethylenethioruea detected in the air and soil of the village was permissible or below the remediation program level set by the US Environmental Protection Agency; that there was no detectable residue of another chemical, chlorothalonil, in the water and extremely low chlorothalonil residues in the soil; and that while thyroid stimulating hormone was higher in Camocaan respondents than in Baliwaga, another study area, that “may be partly accounted for by diet,” as the people in the Camocaan ate less fish and other seafood.

The findings of the joint study showed that the researchers failed to establish a clear link between health issues and aerial spraying by not taking into consideration basic conditions like income, eating preferences and even medical conditions that could have been the result of pregnancy, malnutrition, smoking, alcoholism, poor diet in the residents of the village that they studied, instead of exposure to fungicides sprayed from above.

Advocates of the ban on aerial agency DoH recommendation, naturally, even if it highly likely that their cause would have been better served by more representative and in-depth research in the long run. One wonders if, assuming that better work is done later on that disproves the department’s commissioned joint study, the very same people who are now praising the Health Department in Davao will not turn against it for doing such sloppy, clearly partisan “research.”

It’s happened in the past. For instance, another UP-based researcher, Dr. Romeo Quijano, also went to Sitio Camocaan and reported that a local resident named Marion Dulla died of pesticide poisoning. Some people promptly produced Dulla, who was still very much alive after Quijano’s reports of her demise. Two other residents reported by Quijano to have contracted serious skin problems due to exposure to pesticides turned out to have had them since childhood—when they were still living far away from Camocaan.

The ongoing controversy over aerial spraying in the banana plantations of Davao will not die just on the say-so of the agency. If anything, because of its sloppy work and its penchant to grab headlines, the department may just pushed back the deadline for finding out the truth. –Jojo Robles, Manila Standard Today