By Helke Ferrie

Vitality, October 2007

There is so much bad news every day, especially about health and environment, to put one in danger of   "sinking beneath our anguish"  -  as Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, the famous school of magic, observes to his star student Harry Potter.  It is often depressing to follow the news, for example, on the efforts of those corporations which are hell-bent on forcing genetically engineered foods down everybody's throats in an effort to control the world's food supply, or to watch the United Nation's Codex Committee's autocratic schemes to limit the availability and potency of nutritional supplements worldwide. Especially the many victims of environmental illness suffering from Gulf War Syndrome, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue, and asthma are the most likely to sink beneath their anguish as they endure the seemingly endless evasive tactics of governments, insurance companies, and many doctors.  

But just when one becomes really morose, something tends to happen that surprises and refuels one's hope.  This past summer, while Canadians temporarily took their customary breaks from the evils of the world at their cottages, Justice was amazingly active.   Let us savor the results!  Four astonishing victories were achieved: by the Canadian Human Rights Commission on behalf of environmental illness victims; by the Alliance for Natural Health in the UK for health freedom and good science, thereby putting a spanner into Codex shenanigans; at the US Patent Office which invalidated   four of  Monsanto's key patents for genetically engineered food plants; and in India, where a patent for a major cancer drug was denied to pharmaceutical giant Novartis, thereby creating a precedent which likely will benefit millions of the world's poor.

A Victory for Environmental Illness Patients

Over the years, the Canadian Human Rights Commission had heard many cases from those Canadians seriously disabled by toxic chemicals who were denied accommodation or disability benefits simply because they had been diagnosed as suffering from environmental illness, a diagnosis that almost guarantees such rejection. This is strange when seen in the light of the fact that a Google check brings up almost 18 million hits for "environmental sensitivity" and more than two million specifically for Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS).   Furthermore, according to Statscan, about 1.2 million Canadians (5% of the population) have been officially diagnosed with chemical sensitivity diseases, often to the point of disability.  The Canadian Medical Associations reported in August that the number of sufferers is closer to 27% of the population (one Canadian in 4), because asthma should be included.

In 1999 Senator Caccia, who headed the Senate Standing Committee on Health  that eventually brought us the long over-due new national pesticide legislation, was the first to make the key recommendation that MCS be given recognition and be covered by Medicare. Nothing happened. In 2002 Senator Sparrow became aware of the cruel neglect and bias suffered by such patients in spite of numerous court decisions in their favor, and he asked then Minister of Human Resources, Jane Stewart, to become proactive on the pension and accommodation issues. I was among those invited by her and departmental officials to start the process of formulating new legislative and policy guidelines for this purpose. I wrote a report for the Minister on MCS (see sources). However, my experience with government made me doubtful that anything would come off this nice trip to Ottawa and those friendly chats with Human Resources officials. Sure enough, when the contract arrived, the selected team of doctors and I (who was to do the writing) saw that the fine print expected us to guarantee that our report would never be communicated to the media, and that this entire exercise would have to remain confidential government property. We said "Thanks, but no thanks!"

Then the doctors and patient support groups changed strategy and approached the issue as a human rights imperative. The result is a report and policy statement from the Human Rights Commission published this May � a masterpiece based on the primary medical research and consultations with people who actually know what they are talking about, namely doctors who treat such patients and support groups dedicated to helping the victims of chemical and electromagnetic trespass.   The legal analysis compares case law and legislative initiates in English-speaking countries which share the same legal structure. Interestingly, while the most helpful primary medical research and the creation of the most effective treatments come almost exclusively from American universities and medical organizations, American courts treat environmental illness patients shockingly bad by upholding ultra-right wing rugged individualism, telling them that they are a nuisance to "team-work", progress, and profit, because they can't breathe, think, or move without pain in environments most people can put up with. By contrast, Canadian courts have most of the time delivered brilliantly lucid affirmations of their rights   � which, however, the government agencies responsible for implementation tend to ignore.  Thus, on both sides of the border patients have remained largely abused by the system.

The larger issue, that a biologically incompatible environment is a public health issue that inevitably will affect many more millions, if we don't stop using these poisons for profit, is now beginning to emerge. Maybe the Commission had had enough of hearing heart-breaking cases of abuse caused by arbitrary abuse of power and were fed up with having their rulings routinely ignored - so they decided to pull out all the stops. The report has two parts: a medical and a legal analysis. It recognizes the unalterable reality of our biology when faced with toxic chemicals and tells the powers that be that such patients must be treated in accordance with our human rights law.

The Commission's report is supported by a 2006 the Supreme Court decision  (Tranchemontagne v. Ontario) which asserted that the Human Rights Code of Canada "has primacy over other legislative enactments"; hence, the Human Rights Commission's policy statement based on this 2007 report has the force of law. Canada is now the second country (Germany was the first) to treat environmental illness as a human rights issue that enjoys the full protection of constitutional law.

Why is this illness such a politically hot potato? The most frequent objection to environmental illness is its "idiopathic" nature, i.e. of unknown cause; but most diseases are declared by standard medicine to be idiopathic, such as asthma, arthritis, auto-immune diseases, most neurological disorders, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, schizophrenia and more. Environmental illness is different from all other idiopathic diseases because it is nothing less than the body's revolt against business. If you become ill from just about everything that's in your local mall and the air quality and building materials in the mall itself as well, you are a danger to the economy, not just a sick person. "It is impossible for a man to understand something if his income depends on not understanding it" John Updike observed.  Environmental illness threatens the future of business-as-usual with all those synthetic chemicals that increasing numbers of people are unable to tolerate.

What is now urgently needed is that environmental illness be included in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, a process the World Health Organization handles at the request of medical and governmental authorities. This report will help to make this finally happen.

A Natural Health Victory in Europe

In June the FDA entered into a very scary agreement with the European Commission to the effect that the US and the EU would harmonize their policies on drugs and natural medicines (food supplements). The EU's European Food Safety Authority has a Food Supplements Directive based on the pharmaceutical model. Since 2002 this threatens all non-drug therapies by seeking to limit access to vitamins, minerals and other nutrients by working towards establishing "maximum allowable doses" so absurdly low that they have no therapeutic effect. This is so alarming because such scientifically unsupported nonsense directly feeds into the parallel international effort run by the United Nation's Codex committee which is mostly guided by those European policies. (See my articles of April 2005 and July/August 2006 on Vitality's website.)

The Alliance of Natural Health, based in the UK and led by Dr. Robert Verkerk, decided to challenge this attack on food supplements and went to court. In 2005 the European Advocate ruled that this EU Directive was not only scientifically unsupported but also violated existing trade law as the Directive required taking all currently sold supplements off the market by a specified date and considered potentially toxic until proven otherwise - some day. The International Court ruled a year later that the assumption of toxicity of vitamins, minerals and the like could only be maintained with regard to synthetic analogs, but not for naturally-derived ones, which have been part of the human diet for millions of years.

The European Commission tried to ignore these rulings. So the Alliance challenged them again by insisting on having the difference acknowledged between supplement ingredients that are synthetic analogs and naturally derived ingredients. The ANH scored a formidable victory in March 2007 when they got the European Commission to reverse its position and admit that the International Court did require that natural ingredients cannot be assumed to be toxic and cannot be taken off the market and assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. One of the people who had to sign the statement that contained this significant policy reversal was Basil Mathioudakis who also happens to be the one who votes for all 27 EU member countries at Codex!

The ANH has already moved into the next phase of its challenge which focuses on the EU's and Codex's absurd plan to limit worldwide the dosages of supplements below therapeutic levels � no doubt to reduce the stiff competition Big Pharma is facing from nutraceuticals to its own mostly harmful drugs (visit www.anhcampaign.org).

At last this vitally important difference between "synthetic" and "natural" is now at center-stage of this epic struggle between profitable, deadly, symptom-control medicine and bio-identical, natural therapies that actually heal - and the God-given right to have the freedom to chose.

The US Patent Office versus Monsanto

On July 24 the Public Patent Foundation in the US announced that the US Patent and Trademark Office had agreed with PUBPAT's legal challenge and rejected four patents held by Monsanto which are key to their production of genetically modified crops (US patents nos 5,164,316; 5,196,525; 5,322,938; and 5,353,605). They were originally granted for the so-called "cauliflower mosaic virus" (CaMV) which was discovered in the 1980's to be able to introduce foreign genes into plants. The methods that were subsequently developed throughout biotechnology were based on this virus' unique ability to be the Trojan horse of genetics.

In 2004 Canada's Supreme Court heard the infamous case of Monsanto's attack on Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser who had been accused of having Monsanto-patented GMO seeds among those saved for the following season. Schmeiser was forced to destroy all his seed and lost in court because current patent law is unsuited to inventions that replicate themselves, such as genetically engineered plants.   In the US and elsewhere many more farmers like Schmeiser were totally ruined by Monsanto's aggressive actions.

Last fall, PUBPAT got involved, observing that Monsanto's "ruthless persecutions have fundamentally changed farming" and that the "result has been nothing less than an assault on the foundations of farming practices and traditions that have endured for centuries in this country and millennia around the world, including one of the oldest, the right to save and replant crop seeds." They filed a request for re-examination of the patents involved on September 29 last year.   When PUBPAT challenges a patent, it tends to be reversed about two-thirds of the time.

Re-examination showed that Monsanto did not have the right to these crucial patents, because the actual owners of the intellectual property rights to this CaMV technology are the scientists who invented it � but they neither filed a patent application nor were the party to the ones Monsanto finally obtained. ( www.pubpat.org/monsantovfarmers93rejected.htm) Wow!  Now what?

There is an interesting thread connecting the ANH and the PUBPAT actions. It seems that approaching natural medicine and GMO issues on the basis of natural justice are much less likely to gain traction than approaches that go for the commercial jugular vein, as it were: the ANH looked at trade law and won time and again, and PUBPAT examined the patents themselves and also won.   Now the real fun will start as those corporate bullies scramble to prevent their house of cards from being totally destroyed.

India versus Novartis

On August 5 the High Court of Madras denied Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis the registration of the patent for their leukemia drug Gleevec, reported medical science journalist Jayati Ghosh. This block-buster drug is already patented in 35 countries, but India did not join the world-wide cake walk because its patent law requires that a drug must actually be really different, not merely a slightly modified version of an old drug whose patent is expired. Novartis had the nerve to sell this drug in India to the tune of US $ 26,000 per year per patient, thereby taking patient gouging to a breath-taking level of indifference to human need. Novartis was unable to appeal and is packing up its Indian offices and closing its plants there. India makes the generic version of Gleevec and sells it at a locally reasonable price to that larger portion of humanity that lives in Asia and Africa.

Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts tells Harry Potter that the bad guy of that saga, Voldemort, "himself created his own worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress?" Novartis, Monsanto and the European Commission maybe beginning to feel some of that fear, which the Bible, that other international bestseller, tells us is the beginning of wisdom.