An overdue review

The good news from Davao is that a peer review of a controversial study commissioned in part by the Department of Health condemning the aerial spraying of fungicides in local banana plantations has been completed. The not-so-good news is that no one seems in a real hurry to release the review—possibly because it confirms serious flaws in the much-vilified report on the alleged harmful effects of the spraying method on the health of the local people.

The peer review of the so-called Dionisio study that has the banana-exporting industry going, well, bananas, was ordered by the University of the Philippines-Manila, where the medical researchers who conducted the original report were also based. Given the alarming findings of the study—and the adverse reaction from an industry that has insisted on not harming people or the environment in the decades that it has sprayed fungicide from the air—UP-Manila Chancellor Dr. Ramon Arcadio sought the review, to officially confirm or debunk the findings of the study through an analysis of the work by peers of the researchers at the same campus.

Various foreign-funded non-government organizations based in Davao have made much of the Dionisio study, which alleges that dangerous concentrations of toxic chemicals found in a two small villages next to a banana plantation in Hagonoy, Davao del Sur. The banana growers and their tens of thousands of workers, on the other hand, have denounced the study and the people who conducted it, whom they said used polluted samples, fictional “victims” and less-than-scientific methodologies with the end in view of discrediting a thriving industry that has had no previous record of harming people or the environment.

But the results of the new peer review, which have yet to be disclosed publicly, cannot be released unless the health department requests them from UP-Manila, we’ve been told. This is because the department partly funded the Dionisio study and, in deference to this role, UP authorities have to wait for them to request its release.

Yesterday, representatives of a group calling itself CropLife, composed of traders of government-approved fertilizers and pesticides, went to the DoH to ask its officials to formally request UP for a copy of the much-awaited peer review. The banana growers also want the review released immediately, so that it may be brought to the attention of the government’s inter-agency committee on the environment and health, which is meeting soon to take up a proposed ban on aerial spraying of fungicides, among other matters.

Arcadio and Health Secretary Francisco Duque should not allow their subordinates to delay the release of the peer review any longer, regardless of its conclusions. If the review upholds the findings of the Dionisio study, then it will be hailed as a victory by the NGOs and their foreign donors who want to malign the banana-exporting industry and push the spraying ban; if the reviewers have concluded, as some who have read the study insist, that the study is grievously flawed, then those who twisted it to suit their purposes must be held accountable for what they did.

But the peer review, we’ve been told, was submitted several weeks ago. Let’s hope that the delay doesn’t portend a repudiation of the Dionisio study in the review, because its perfectly natural that some people in UP-Manila wouldn’t want to make their own colleagues look like fools—or worse, accomplices of ill-intentioned groups who will compromise the scientific principles that they should hold dear.

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Indeed, if the researchers who compiled the data and analyzed it for the Dionisio study did their job well and have nothing to hide, they shouldn’t fear any review of their findings. After all, they, too, would be alarmed if their findings were accurate, and would seek the opinions of their own colleagues if only to confirm their results, as regular scientists and researchers should.

But there has been nothing regular about the circumstances surrounding the study conducted by Dr. Alan Dionisio and Dr. Carissa Dioquinio of the Philippine Society of Clinical and Occupational Toxicology and Dr. Lynn Crisanta Panganiban of the National Poison Management and Control Center, Dionisio’s fellow researchers. And, in the case of Dionisio himself, he has even admitted publicly that some of the findings in his study were indeed questionable.

Recently, when he was questioned by private sector experts in public health and toxicology, lead investigator Dionisio categorically admitted that there was no direct correlation between the aerially-sprayed fungicide and the illnesses of a few residents, mostly transients, in Sitios Camocaan and Baliwaga, where the study was supposed to have been conducted. Furthermore, despite the alarmist reports on the study emanating from the NGOs, it has been established that the chemicals found by the researchers in the air at the study sites were present in extremely low amounts that could not harm residents or their environment.

It didn’t help the researchers’ cause that during a meeting with residents who demanded that they substantiate their claims, they repeatedly said that their work was in no way connected to the earlier published writings of a certain Dr. Romeo Quijano. Quijano and his daughter authored two stories that described many people dying of disease in the “poisoned village” of Camocaan due to aerial spraying of pesticides, charges which were later taken up by NGOs that manufactured reports of dead people who were later found alive and well and others who had congenital illnesses that Quijano said they got from sprayed chemicals.

However, the introduction to Dionisio’s study clearly stated that it “was originally prompted by complaints from the residents of Sito Camocaan…. In 1997, several individuals residing in Camocaan complained of skin diseases which were ulcerated and non-healing (Quijano and Quijano 2000). Some developed blisters and pruritic lesions. The residents attributed the conditions to the banana plantation pesticides to which they were allegedly exposed. Thus, the residents, through a local organization, sought the assistance of the Pesticide Action Network-Asia and the Pacific to look into the problem.”

Then there’s the fact that while the study was conducted three years ago, its unreviewed results were released only this year—and made public through one of those investigative programs on national television, in all likelihood through the efforts of the NGOs who are pushing for the spraying ban.

Despite the many and repeated obfuscations by the people who want to destroy the banana industry in Mindanao, the truth will eventually come out. The release of the results of the UP-Manila peer review of the Dionisio study is a good start to that process. –Manila Standard Today