#1) That is exactly what I’m worried about; that our data, which we’ve gone to great trouble to collect, will not be viewed as impartial or even useful.
Between 2000 to 2002 I was the Government’s expert but then I wrote the report that kicked this all off. In my report I concluded that antifouling paints could not be the source of the oyster problems in Georges Bay and I recommended a catchment investigation. That report was Peer reviewed repeatedly until they got a report that didn’t recommend a catchment investigation.
Then there is the “Scammell Report” which has been totally mis-represented for years. In my game, reports that contain anomolous observations and a request for funding are called “grant applications”. Funny name, hard to pronounce, but without one, nothing gets done!
In Tasmania, “grant applications” are called “manifestos”, “bad science”, “alarmist”, etc.
So, do I trust your government and its servants with Alison’s and my data. No I do not!
Having said that, Alison told Dr Taylor if he wants our data he can obtain it from our lawyer. If he wants the verification data and the additional data from Chris Hickey in New Zealand, he will need permission from the third party who paid for it, via our lawyer.
My preference is that our work and Chris’s goes to a third party panel of scientist who have nothing to do with Tasmania and they make recommendations as to what it says and what should be done.
That is the only way that I would be confident that Tasmanians get the outcome they deserve.
This comment is taken from this article, HERE
You can comment on this extract, or on the original MR: HERE
Read for yourself; Transcript of Part 2, From HERE:
Australian Story
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Something In The Water Part 2 – Transcript
PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT: Monday, 22 February , 2010
CAROLINE JONES, PRESENTER: Hello, I’m Caroline Jones. Tonight, the compelling conclusion to the story of Georges Bay in the beautiful Bay of Fires region of north-east Tasmania. Last week’s episode centered on the alliance forged between local oyster farmers, a GP and a Sydney scientist. They joined forces because of what they saw as government indifference in the face of serious concerns about water quality and human and animal health. They poured tens of thousands of dollars of their own money into their investigations. What they eventually found turned out to be the very opposite of what they expected. We begin tonight with a quick recap.
(Excerpt from ‘Something in the Water – Part 1′ on Australian Story 15 February 2010)
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: She’s got a history that most people are completely unaware of. She’s doing in Tasmania what she did in the Falklands in 1982. She stepped right out in front of the firing line for what she believes in.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: It dawned on me that really I was seeing an increase in all sorts of diseases that to me was quite unexpected.
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: The oyster farmers started noticing significant losses after rainfall. So I was called in because I was an expert in oysters.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: And in 2004 we had this huge flood and they lost 90 per cent of the intertidal oysters.
DR DAVID OBENDORF, WILDLIFE VET PATHOLOGIST: Tasmanian devil facial tumor disease came out of nowhere back in the mid 90s, just north of St Helens.
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: When we started to look at the size of the plantations it became apparent that here was a very large source of potential toxic chemical.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: And in fact could be in the water.
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: What we appear to have is a problem that’s going right across the ecosystem.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: We released a joint paper which has been called the Scammell Report.
BRYAN GREEN, RESOURCES MINISTER: This report has no science attached to it.
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: Well, of course there was no science there. All we had was a series of observations and a request for some science.
DR PHIL PULLINGER, GP AND DIRECTOR OF ENVIRONMENT TASMANIA: They basically tried to shoot her down and then put up a brick wall.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: So we decided just to pay for it ourselves and go and have a look to see what pesticides were coming down in the catchment.
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: So we organized for dry weather water to be sampled, and they rang me up and said ‘your water’s toxic’. And so we were both now, you know, more than concerned. We were now alarmed.
(End of excerpt)
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: On the one hand you don’t want to alarm people if it’s not actually a huge problem, although it seems like it’s a really significant problem. On the other hand you actually have people whose livelihoods depend on having water quality which is pure; on having a clean green area; on continuing to live on the pristine environment that we have here.
JIM HARRIS: Whatever she does… knows that she’s not a scaremonger or a muckraker; that she only has people’s best interest at heart with whatever she does.
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: The Government had known that there was a problem in that location since 2000. We’re now in 2005 and out of our own desperation we’ve gone and tested the water.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: And to our surprise, it came back that it was toxic. So we immediately alerted Public Health to our findings. The samples were reproduced; they were taken again.
IAN COATSWORTH, OYSTER FARMER: We had another scientist come down from Sydney, who took samples out of the skimmer box in conjunction with the State Government. So they got 50 per cent of the sample, we got 50 per cent of the sample. The Government tested for toxicity; we tested for toxicity.
(Excerpt from Government sample findings March 2005)
(On screen text): The Tasmanian Government reported that no man-made chemicals were found in the water. Bottom and surface samples did not prove toxic to daphnia (water fleas). Only concentrated surface scum proved toxic to daphnia. The scum was analysed and found to contain organic compounds from ‘naturally produced vegetation such as ti-tree and eucalypts’. These organic compounds are common and natural.
(End of excerpt)
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: Tasmanian Government’s conclusion was that it was naturally occurring toxins and therefore it’s okay. I said, ‘Well that’s absurd.’
(Excerpt from ABC News March 2005)
STEPHEN SALTER, MAYOR BREAK O’DAY COUNCIL: We should actually be taking legal action against people who are putting down our community on a regular basis on… based on non-scientific fact.
STEPHEN KONS, MINISTER FOR PRIMARY INDUSTRIES & WATER: People who make such accusations and quackery in my view should certainly hold back, make sure that what they say is genuine, and have the results to back it up.
(End of excerpt)
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: The fact that they wouldn’t investigate this any further and wouldn’t take protective measures with regard to public health, Marcus and I both felt were totally inappropriate, and for our own peace of mind we decided that we would carry on and try and find out what this toxin was.
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: So it was no longer ‘what should we do?’ but rather ‘what can we do?’, and what we could do because of my links into the scientific industry and because of Alison’s desire to have this thing fixed, was we could run our own private investigation. It meant we were going to have to be fairly careful about what we spent money on because it’s very easy to spend a lot of money very quickly when you don’t know what you’re looking for.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: Our belief at the outset was that this toxin that was occurring in dry weather was a chemical – a manmade chemical that was being sprayed in the hills around that area. And that somehow it had got to the groundwater and that’s why it was present all the time. So we started looking for manmade chemicals.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: So we’ve actually taken multiple samples. We’ve taken it from the upper south George, the upper north George where the two George Rivers meets to form the George itself. We’ve taken from the bottom end of the catchment just where the water intake for the town is.
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: Every time we took a water sample test in that catchment the water came back toxic.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: We’ve involved five different universities, five different laboratories. All of them top notch, all of them accredited nationally.
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: And in the event we conducted approximately 26/27 individual studies of possible toxins that might cause the toxicity of the George River water.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: Our findings had been confirmed every time we’ve tested.
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: We effectively eliminated all possible known man-made and naturally occurring toxins that have caused problems in the literature. These include all the pesticides, they include metals, they include blue-green algal toxins, they include toxins from funguses, they include fungicides, so on and so forth. Everything that we knew could cause toxicity we had eliminated. We’d tested it twice and it wasn’t there. And yet the toxicity was there every time we went. So this is 26/27 water samples later… sampling events later. We still couldn’t find a cause.
(Excertp of inspection of water intake pipe)
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR (Walking to river’s edge): So here we go Marcus – this is the water intake pipe for the St Helens.
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: It’s interesting at this site because there is no foam. and yet it reforms as soon as it goes over that waterfall down there. So that kind of suggests to me that the particulate matter and the toxin is spread from top to bottom.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: And this in fact is our most toxic sampling site, isn’t it?
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: Ah, yes.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: This is where the water is at most toxicity.
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: Yes. It’s always been most toxic here.
(End of excerpt)
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: I do not know how effective the sand filtration system is and that is something that we are looking at. But what I do know is, that in the raw water supply going into that sand filter every single day of the week, it contains a toxin. We also tested water from the nearby catchment at St Marys. Unlike St Helens, which is surrounded by plantation timbers – the eucalyptus nitens – St Marys is surrounded by natural forest. And we’ve found no evidence of toxicity in the St Marys catchment. However in the St Helens catchment directly below this monoculture of plantation trees, we had permanently present toxin.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR (at South Georges River): This is the head waters of the South George which feeds into the George River, and here we are surrounded by plantations. This used to be natural bush and farming land and now we are completely surrounded by plantations here – the Eucalyptus Nitens. This is the source of our drinking water for St Helens, let alone all the animals that drink from it, and this is one of the areas where we’ve discovered that the water in fact is toxic. This should be the most pristine water. This is the very head waters of the South George. Where is this toxin coming from?
(Excerpt of Dr Alison driving to visit patient)
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: I’m off to go and see a patient who’s got a very… a very rare cancer – Waldenstrom’s Anaemia. She’s one of only approximately 18 in Australia, and we just happen to have two in St Helens. And in the last perhaps six years or so we’ve actually seen quite few people with really quite rare autoimmune diseases of their brain for instance. We’ve had a case of Wegener’s Granulomatosis; it’s actually quite a rare disease.
So now looking back on this over the last ten years, I realize that I see many things now that as a GP… that many GPs would never see one of these cases in their working lifetime.
(End of excerpt)
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: Clearly in a population of less than 3,000 to have these rare diseases – to have this chronic ill health – there must be something on the go to explain this.
(Excerpt of Dr Alison Bleaney talking with patient)
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: Now, I hear you haven’t been doing so well?
GLENDA BLAIR, PATIENT: No, there’s been a few more problems cropping up. I’ve had one with my eyes, so I had to go to the ophthalmologist.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: So, how have the headaches been Glenda?
GLENDA BLAIR, PATIENT: They’re not so bad. My eye’s been okay, but still getting a bit of the headaches.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: Headaches, yep.
GLENDA BLAIR, PATIENT (to interviewer): Well, it’s not a curable cancer. No-one really offers any explanation. But you do wonder because even with my cancer, they are looking at whether it’s environment factors or viruses that are causing this particular cancer. So you do get a bit concerned about the environment itself around here.
(End of Excerpt)
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: After 26 to 27 independent investigations of different possible hypotheses as to what this toxin was, in the end the only possible source of contamination that we were left with was the trees themselves – these plantation trees. Alison and I decided that we would test the actual plantation timber leaf material itself; we’d test the actual tree. When we took the leaves and extracted their contents and checked them for toxicity they were indeed very toxic. Ironically the Government and our investigation have come to the same conclusions – that the origin of that toxin is the trees. They’ve concluded that it’s naturally occurring and therefore not an issue. We haven’t accepted that.
(On screen text): Having found that water samples from the George River were toxic to daphnia (water fleas), oyster larvae and sea urchins, Drs Bleaney and Scammell decided to go one step further. They sent water samples to the University of New South Wales for testing on human cell lines.
DR CHRISTIAN KHALIL, ENVIRONMENTAL TOXICOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF NSW: Whatever was in the water was toxic to skin, liver and lung cells. Interestingly, we found that using the water undiluted, you can kill 100 per cent of your population of cells, which was surprising. And the more you dilute the water the less kill rate you get. We got some testing previously done on the Olympic site where we had some heavily contaminated water which came out positive. But that’s the second incidence where I see a water sample which can trigger such toxicity – 100 per cent. And it’s surprising to get something like that in a pristine area that you expect like in Tasmania. Whatever is in the water is killing all the cell population in my tests. It is toxic, but I don’t know the extent of the impact on the whole body. But because, as you know, we’re doing experiments using single cells which is different from an organism where you have multiple cells interacting with each other and where cells can repair themselves in the human body.
(On screen text): Having been accused previously of ‘unscientific quackery’, Bleaney and Scammell say they wanted additional confirmation before publicly revealing their findings. An anonymous donor agreed to help pay. Internationally recognised eco-toxicologist, Dr Chris Hickey from New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Institute, reviewed and repeated the tests.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: We’ve collected that foam from two sites, one of which was near the water intake for the St Helens township.
DR CHRIS HICKEY, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF WATER AND ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH, NZ : And when you look at the foam under the microscope – and we’ve looked at the type of characteristics of the foam – it’s got a lot of broken down plant tissue in it and debris, and it’s about half sort of organic matter that makes up the foam. At certain high levels it causes complete disintegration of the blue mussel larvae. We’ve been able to show that that occurs from the eucalyptus leaves as well. The disintegration of the blue mussel larvae is actually unique to this foam and now these studies with these eucalyptus leaves. We’ve never seen it elsewhere before. The hypothesis was that the Tasmanian plantation trees had been genetically improved and that had led to an increase in toxicity of those leaves.
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: The timber companies themselves refer to these as genetically improved. They don’t say how they’re improved.
DR CHRIS HICKEY, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF WATER AND ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH,NZ: We decided that we’d test the toxicity of the leaves from old growth eucalyptus nitens in Victoria and compared those with the plantation trees in Tasmania. There were subtle differences in chemistry with the leaves but it wasn’t increasing the toxicity of the leaves. The major difference that we found between these leaves was quite marked in the relation to the ability to generate foam. The Tasmanian trees generated a lot more foam and this foam was a lot more stable than the Victorian leaves. The significance of this is that… in that the toxin is carried in the foams – this is the mode by which the toxin can be transferred within the catchment and moved down the river system and into an estuarine environment.
IAN COATSWORTH, OYSTER FARMER: Which was a real worry for us as oyster growers because that particulate matter that is coming down the river runs into our bay 24 hours a day, and it’s also food for our oysters. It’s what… one of the things the oysters eat.
DR CHRIS HICKEY, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF WATER AND ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH,NZ: I think they really may have stumbled on something quite new here. Not only did you have the major event that occurred in 2004 with major lethality’s of oysters and other species, but they’ve had ongoing problems in much reduced oyster health. And this is symptomatic that it wasn’t just the event that occurred at that time, but we’ve got an ongoing, if you like, a stressor in that system; quite a major thing that’s affecting oysters.
IAN COATSWORTH, OYSTER FARMER: We first reported major problems in about 2000, and now it’s what, ten years down the track and we’ve still got nowhere. That in itself is just devastating. When everything was right, it’s just a wonderful industry. But you can’t defeat the undefeatable. There’s other losses apart from the oysters. There’s the… it’s, you know, the anguish, depression; it’s dreadful.
DR CHRIS HICKEY, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF WATER AND ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH,NZ: We wouldn’t see this necessarily in the laboratory or even expect to sort of look for this sort of effect. You’re only going to see it once you get things on a very large scale monoculture. It’s a classic case of potential unintended circumstances, unintended effects from something that’s on a large scale like plantation forestry. We’re quite comfortable that we know that the foam is very toxic, but we don’t know what quantities are produced and the frequency that it’s occurred and how often things are exposed. So that is a major unknown that needs some more work.
DR FIONA YOUNG, REPRODUCTIVE TOXICOLOGIST, FLINDERS UNIVERSITY: When I first became involved in this research, I was a bit doubtful about it. So I went through all the data, all the experiments and all the results that Marcus and Alison had put together. I went through it with a fine toothcomb. It is classical toxicology. It’s rigorous; It’s right down the line. I couldn’t find a nicer piece of work. And then as I got drawn into the story, I became fascinated by the mystery. I think there are a number of different things going on here and we need to work out what’s going on in this river. We used two different cell lines… two different cancer cell lines to test the toxicity of the foam that Chris Hickey worked on and to some other water samples that I collected from the George River. We actually took breast cancer cells and cells from a placental tumor. We deliberately choose these cancer cells for culture systems because they’re hardy and robust. They both died; both cancer cell lines died. It doesn’t mean that actually if somebody drinks the water that it will poison them. It doesn’t mean that, because it could be that the digestive processes that go on in the stomach might break down the toxin, might render the toxin harmless; we just don’t know. But what was surprising was the speed with which the cells died after exposure to these water samples. So we’ve investigated the effects of the toxins on cell death and cell viability, and that’s one thing. But in fact you can get more subtle effects. So for example, the toxin might affect the hormone system in the body. And the hormone system might be affected… is more likely to be affected before the cells actually die. Cell death’s at the end of the line; you get other damage occurring before cell death. So these are preliminary data because we’ve only done two separate samples in a number of ways in the lab, with a number of different tests. But those two sets of data, as well as all the data that’s come from the… another research group at Uni New South Wales, as well as all the other invertebrate data that others have done, are enough to say we’ve got to look at this in far more detail.
DR CHRIS HICKEY, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF WATER AND ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH,NZ: Since our original experiments we designed a second series of experiments whereby we would chemically analyse both leaf material from eucalyptus nitens and foam material, and then follow that up with bioassays with both our fresh water cladocerans and our blue mussels. So this is some sort of forensic toxicology work that we’re doing. What we’ve been able to do is come very close to showing that there’s a common chemical fraction in both the eucalyptus nitens leaves and in the toxicity in the foams. So from that we really feel we’re very close to being able to confirm that the eucalyptus nitens is the primary source of toxicity in the foams. We just haven’t been able to actually get down to the final fingerprinting and molecular weight determinations which will give us our final linkage to the eucalyptus nitens.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: In the beginning, after the oyster kill, we actually thought it was just pesticides and we went looking for those. And although we didn’t find any at the time, we know that pesticides are still being aerially sprayed in the water catchment; they’re still being ground sprayed, and it adds to the complexity of the picture.
DR CHRIS HICKEY, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF WATER AND ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH,NZ: A very real challenge that Alison and Marcus faced here is that they’re seeing both effects on human health in Alison’s practice as a GP, as well as these effects on oysters and effects on other aquatic species. It’s difficult to assess whether your human health eco-toxicological and oyster health problems are all with the same causative agent; just making that linkage is difficult. Chemical use of course in our environment is an accepted part of agricultural management. I think something we shouldn’t dismiss entirely is the potential for this being a cocktail effect of a number of different things occurring in this catchment.
DR ALISON BLEANEY, GP & LOCAL COUNCILLOR: And whether this is having an effect, for instance, on the Tassie Devil or not remains to be seen. But we would call that… we would call for testing as soon as possible to be done in such a way that can determine that.
DR MARCUS SCAMMELL, MARINE ECOLOGIST: So from the oyster farmers’ point of view, they’re in an impossible catch 22. If they don’t speak out, they will never be able to grow a crop. If they do speak out, there will be an inevitable backlash in the market place. The onus will then be on them to prove that whatever oysters they do manage to grow are safe to eat. What they do now is instead of growing the oysters in the intertidal zone where they grow fastest, but where they also come into contact with the toxin, they now grow those oysters at depth. And they only bring them to the surface when there has been no rainfall and when the water that’s sitting in the bay is ocean water. So they now have a strategy for growing oysters that are safe to eat.
ALISON BLEANEY: Of course I wonder if I’ve got it right. You go over it again and again. We’re not saying we actually have absolute proof of what’s going on. We’re actually saying that this needs to be investigated and it needs to be looked at very carefully. I’ve been accused of scaremongering and I suppose talking out like this, you could actually accuse me of that. But I don’t actually see it as scaremongering because no-one really seems to want to listen. The Government has to take some action and make sure that the main reason it is here for is to protect human health.
DR CHRIS HICKEY, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF WATER AND ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH,NZ: When we encounter environmental problems on this scale it is normally at some stage you expect a major sort of environmental project to be funded by a government research organization.
DR PHIL PULLINGER, GP AND DIRECTOR OF ENVIRONMENT TASMANIA: There’s nearly 300,000 hectares of plantations in Tasmania and over half of the plantations in Tasmania are eucalyptus nitens plantations. It’s extensively established across huge areas across northern Tasmania. You’ve got a finding here that has the potential to have significant public health implications. It’s clear that it’s early stages and there’s a whole lot more research work that needs to be done. But it is absolutely crazy that a couple of private citizens have had to keep going and investigating this issue, funding it themselves, doing all the work to try and get to the bottom of what is essentially an environmental and public health issue that government should act on.
END CAPTIONS:
The State Government was approached but declined to comment.
The State Director of Health says investigations and monitoring in St Helens have not suggested any abnormal clustering of particular disease types or any adverse trends. His full statement is available as part of our broadband coverage: abc.net.au/austory.
The Forest Industries Association of Tasmania has provided a detailed four page statement published on our site, along with extended interviews, links and commentary from a range of perspectives.
Interview with Dr David Obendorf, from From HERE
Australian Story
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Dr David Obendorf – Interview Transcript
PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT: Monday, 22 February , 2010
For many Australians, they recognise that Tasmania is a last bastion, or stronghold for quite a number of unique fauna, particularly the carnivorous marsupials like the Tasmanian devil and the quolls. We’ve got a number of species that have remained here, whereas on the mainland they’ve become extinct. And this is because of the pressures of feral species like the introduced fox and the feral cat. So I guess Tasmania, even though it’s a small land mass, had a beautiful suite of animals. It still does represent a beautiful mix of wildlife ecology: marsupials, birds, mammals, marine mammals. So for me it was paradise on earth, a real sort of Eden.
Well when I began as a veterinary pathologist working in the Department of Primary Industries here in the early 80s, I had the opportunity to really see our wildlife in sickness and in health. And several years into the job I started to build, with the help of my mentor Dr Barry Munday, a pattern of diseases in wildlife. We started to see a range of really unique, interesting diseases that were afflicting platypus and wallabies and wombats. And later on, of course, now we’re seeing this horrendous infectious, transmissible cancer in Tasmanian devils. And they needed to be analysed from the point of view of what caused these diseases which sometimes were fairly simple pathogens, almost opportunistic pathogens, to be causing serious disease, overt disease.
And, of course, it still leaves you the conundrums of saying, well, is it just that you’ve got an incursion of a new pathogen into our environment? Or is it that there’s something about the genetics of this isolated population of animals or is it something that we, as human beings, may have done to subtly modify the environment to allow for this relationship to change. Because what disease in wildlife populations tends to be is a harbinger of instability, of a breakdown in normal cycles of a population reaching a stable balance with other animals interacting with their ecology. And perturbations, whether they are human induced, or the fact that we’ve actually through our agency allowed for the introduction of new pathogens. This is the brave new world that we face in the 21st century.
We use poisons to suppress the wildlife that we think are nuisances. We start to use chemicals to support the growth of our particular commodities, whether they be trees or vegetables, you know, sheep, cattle. And, of course, there is a downside and that downside is the wildlife. And it can be quite subtle and, unfortunately, the amount of money that we spend as a community, both in the state of Tasmania and nationally is miniscule in comparison to what we spend supporting the production of food, our export industries. It’s all predicated on having a tradable commodity. And this is driving a range of chemical uses that we’re taking for granted.
We have a sort of a blind faith that the regulatory processes are going to protect us. And yet, at a sub jurisdictional level Tasmania is giving us a lens into a brave new world that is going to be potentially more ridden with cancer and disabling diseases that are going to be linked to in, you know, minute quantities of chemicals that are changing, genetic triggering events within our bodies. Epigenetic factors, hormone disrupting factors.
The work on devil facial tumour disease has been very much controlled by the State Government agency responsible for the conservation of this species. And that’s the Department of Primary Industries. Which is quite paradoxical that it’s a Primary Industry department that is supporting the conservation of a threatened species. But there has been a real sense of controlling what science is done and what’s not done. For ages and ages independent scientists, wildlife disease experts have been requesting that the relationship between chemical triggers and viral aetiologies be studied. In other words, what is the causal link that causes this cancer to spontaneously emerge into the landscape in 1996 or thereabouts.
Surprisingly, you know, and perhaps not surprisingly, we’re finding that devils have got residues of significant synthetic, organic pollutants that are from the products that we as a human species contaminated into their environment. And they are, because of their role as a top order carnivore, they’re bio-accumulating those chemicals. We’re talking about dioxins, PCBs, fire retardant chemicals, the PBEDs, the organo chlorines. Now, some of these chemicals are linked to a range of maladies, including carcinogenesis and the potential to impact on cell development and expression of hormones and what have you. So, what we’ve got to really think about is this background impact of these chemicals having an instigator effect on the expression of the index cases of this cancer? And is it changing the immune system of these devils as well. And these are factors that I think really make the devil almost a shocking animal to be like the canary down the mineshaft, the coal mine.
This is the metaphor that was used, you know, in the 18th century where the small canary was placed in a cage and put down on a string, down into a coal shaft to determine whether there was poisonous carbon monoxide and methane that would poison the miners. If the bird came up dead, they would know that there was no fresh air that was able to be breathed by humans. And this devil, not just one devil but 70 percent of the devils across Tasmania, of which there’s estimated there was a population between a 130 and 170 thousand at the time when this outbreak first emerged, have died in the space of thirteen years as a result of this transmissible infectious cancer.
Tasmanian devil facial tumour disease is a shocking disease. It came out of nowhere back in the mid 90s. It was in 1996, I think, that a Dutch photographer was working at Mount William National Park filming devils doing their normal thing in the landscape just north of St Helens, that he recognised that a number of devils in that population had these raw, gaping, large swellings on their face, ulcerated, bleeding. And he recognised that this was different. He also recognised there weren’t as many devils in the population.
You’d be a fool not to try and see if there’s one health underpinning for a scenario such as what appeared to have been occurring in the north east region of Tasmania. That region had undergone massive land transformation and the introduction of silvi-cultural plantations over vast catchments and the beginnings of usages of chemicals that were being aerial sprayed over large acreages.
The north east corner of Tasmania has undergone massive transformation since the Regional Forest Agreement was signed in 1996. You have a mosaic of landscapes now created with silvi cultural plantations, hardwood plantations of nitens, eucalyptus nitens trees. You have some fragmented pockets of natural environment. You have dairy farms. You have small villages and you have the large settlement of St Helen’s which is at the end of the catchment of the George River. So in that sort of context chemical usage has really come into being a dominant player in the sort of risk management of that whole environment. Because you’re dealing with herbicides and pesticides, insecticides, the use of 10-80 for a long time as well. So all these things are playing into that landscape and affecting how the water may pick up those residues and the impact it might have on oysters. But also on the bio-accumulation risk that it would represent to the species, the native species that are living in natural ecosystems.
I remember when the Marcus Scammell report was actually released or given some prominence in the media because it came with the government really lampooning it as being sensationalist and drawing a range of connectivities or associations, that they believed were unfounded and they really wanted to dismiss them out of hand. And, being a former public servant and working in the area of wildlife disease and investigation of pathology and new and emerging incidents, it seemed to me a very heavy handed way of really putting down somebody who was an expert in a field of endeavour who was recognised, you know, to be able to speak on this matter. And we had a very significant mortality of oysters. And he was comparing it with his experience in other parts of Australia. Well credentialed person. And he made some statements about devil facial tumour as well. And rather than seeing it as part of the mix, this is really good dialogue, you know, this is where science needs to be open and transparent and allow everybody to put their cards on the table. If you immediately remove a card, you can’t play the game. The game is corrupted. And that’s the way I felt, that it wasn’t about saying whether Marcus was right or wrong, it was his ability to put the cards on the table.
A person who comes in from somewhere else can be a bit more courageous but it’s almost impossible for a local to speak as a prophet in their own backyard. Sometimes an outsider can be courageous and say, hey guys or gals, you haven’t seen the way the world is. There’s a bigger picture here and these are the dots that I’ve joined up.
Tasmania is, is really so special that we’ve got to allow these mavericks, these free thinkers, these big picture thinkers, to actually explain, maybe what is the story behind our pseudo story. Because it’s the thing that’s going to be the salvation of Tasmania.
There’s, there’s great moral respect for Alison. She’s a courageous, tenacious advocate for the common good of human beings.
There is profound denial about what she’s saying. It’s almost like you don’t want to visit the concentration camps. You don’t want to see what’s happening in the forests. You don’t want to see the consequences of the use of chemicals over a landscape. And it’s usually the voiceless, the wildlife, that are your earliest indicators that something is going wrong. There’s something rotten in the state of Tasmania. When wildlife start to develop a range of maladies, it’s saying something is unstable in the ecology. It’s not just that the chemicals are the trigger of that, it’s saying there are multiplicity of factors building here which need to explored and that’s where the Marcus Scammell example of putting all the cards on the table is really relevant. We must have a dialogue which is asking the critical questions. So you do a risk assessment that says all things are to be considered here and we develop a proof of concept idea where you, for example, with devil facial tumour disease, you allow international, world renowned experts in areas of emerging diseases, molecular biology, DNA research, genomic studies, proteomics, nano-technology to be involved in the cutting edge of trying to understand not only how to cure this disease, but how did it develop in the first place. Because if we don’t, if we don’t learn how, how it occurred in the first place, the chances are we’ll spend tens of millions of dollars, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars trying to a rescue a species and find that we have another spontaneous transmissible cancer turning up somewhere else in another species.
So, as a veterinarian, you have to work within the stringencies of certain things. Wildlife kill is something that happens every day. People see animals killed on the road. They are really fertile ground for a pathologist because, not only do you find out that, okay, yes, the animal’s been killed by a car, but that animal may have had a sickness as well that caused it to be slower, may have been blind or incoordinate. It may have had an illness that caused it to be quite ataxic or slow and it got killed. Once you start to look at enough wildlife road kill you can start to build up some pictures. You can take samples for residues, testing for chemicals, all sorts of useful things can come out of animals that would normally either be, you know, decomposed at the side of the road or be eaten by another species. And we really owe it to ourselves to allow, you know, these opportunities to be investigated.
You’ve got to have permit to pick up road kill in Tasmania. And so this is an arcane piece of legislation which prevents people from investigating road kill in Tasmania.
You have to go through the gatekeepers. And the gatekeepers is the Department of Primary Industry, Water and the Environment.
If you wanted to do testing of a particular water sample on devils to determine whether it had a toxic impact, you’d have to go through the gatekeepers which are the Department of Primary Industry, Water and the Environment to get approval. And they would have to assess it against what they consider the criteria for suggesting whether that was a plausible investigation to undertake.
If they wanted to test water samples from the George’s Bay Catchment on Tasmanian devils, they would have to pass muster with the Department of Primary Industry, Water and the Environment. They control the research agenda of understanding this facial tumour disease. They have from the very outset and they have been very reluctant to allow international and national bodies to have access to cell lines, for example, of the devil facial tumour and, indeed, to do any research on devils per se.
It’s almost – what has to happen as a result of the failure of the regulators and the governmental officials to take community science seriously. People such as Alison Bleaney and Marcus Scammell, who are really saying they’ve got some issues that need to be looked at and hats off to them. You know, I congratulate them for their persistence and their dedication to continue to investigate in the face of so many hurdles and obstructions to allowing the story to come out. People like Marcus and Alison are purely trying to keep up with the pace of this frenetic need for humans to dominate the landscape. And at the moment plantation expansion through managed investment schemes has been a significant change to the landscape of Tasmania.
There has been a limited testing of devils in terms of chemical residues that could have some sort of tie-in with this cancer. The nature of the biology of this cancer is that it is generated out of a one clone of mutant cells or transformed cells and it’s just unusual that it’s been able to transfer quite seamlessly between animals. In other words, through biting. The inoculation of this infectious cell has allowed for the cancer to grow in all the other devils that it has infected. And that’s a scary scenario. It saying that either there is immune failure on the part of all those devils to recognise a foreign agent: in other words a cell from another devil has been an alien cell. Or there is a subtle way this cell is getting under the radar of the immune system. This is why, you know, some very sophisticated further research needs to be done that will really tease out this. And it quite complex because the epigenetic factors that may relate to low grade exposure to chemicals might have a role to play in that epidemiology of this disease.
I’m scratching my head as a pathologist to know or to understand why there are so many of these unusual opportunistic infections occurring in wildlife. And, unfortunately, there’s just not enough research being given to wildlife investigation. And that’s coming through time and time again, that we just have these sudden outbreaks of disease and it’s as if we quickly corral them and try to understand them and then we just sort of, you know, the caravan moves on to the next big disease that’s going to hit wildlife. And occasionally they spill over into animals like, of importance, like pigs or horses or poultry or sheep and cattle. But, you know, the big issue is, you know, when are these sorts of relationships between ecology, wildlife, humans and what we’re trying to do to produce food from animals, how do we create one health around understanding this and what we’re doing to the planet? And that’s what I think Alison and Marcus are, they’re joining up some critical dots in the relationship between how we use the land and what we do to the creatures that we use for our food. And when this outbreak of mass mortality in oysters happened, you know, you can’t go for simplistic answers like, it’s just a fresh water pulse flood event that’s killed the oysters. You know, you’d have to say, well, how many times has a freshwater pulse event killed oysters in other parts of the world? Is it as simple as that? And then you would say, well, what is in the water that, you know, may be, you know, biocidal? So, I mean, it’s very much empirical deductive science that begins the dialogue in saying, is there a relationship here between an event, a sudden event, mass mortality, and something that may well have affected that ecology or that environment to contaminate it? Fair enough to me.
Well, the diseases that are really interesting in terms of coming out of nowhere for Tasmania are Mucor amphibiorum, which is a fungal disease in platypus which doesn’t occur on the mainland and yet we know that, that organism occurs on the mainland. It causes disease in frogs but here we haven’t been able to detect the disease in frogs. That causes masses ulcers on the skin of platypus. We’ve got the devil facial tumour disease which is a transmissible infectious cancer. We have a cat born infection called toxoplasmosis which is spread by feral cats which kills wallabies, wombats, bandicoots. Again, in some instances it can be an opportunistic infection. It can be low grade infection but here it kills animals, it causes clinical disease. We’ve got a staphylococcal infection that infests the pads of echidnas so they get this sort of raw pustular wound that impregnates their pads they, they just can’t dig. And this is just a new malady. Just recently we had an outbreak of salmonellosis in sparrows. Sparrows just literally dying in hundreds and thousands. And a bit of a spill over into native birds here. So we’re looking at diseases that have a signature in terms of a pathogen but, at the same time, you’re sort of saying, well, why Tasmania? Why, all of a sudden are we seeing so many diseases? Mange in wombats. Sarcoptic mange, you know, a little mite that burrows into skin causing intensely painful skin lesion where they develop all this weeping skin and they become like armour plated animals just losing their skin. They walk around like sort of robots because they just can’t stretch out, there’s no flexibility left in their skin. These animals die an incredibly painful death as a result of having this disease. Chytrid fungus in frogs, you know, chytrid fungus in frogs, an amphibian infection that’s gone global. So, you know, it’s really this sense of apathy and the belief that somehow wildlife is a nuisance and if they die, well, you know, well, what do you expect us to do about it? We’ve got other things to do. We’ve got, you know, sheep and cattle to farm and, and trees to grow.
It’s a situation where Tasmania is the hotspot for wildlife diseases, there’s no doubt about that. The government, after great reluctance, has published a report listing, you know, about twenty two significant wildlife diseases that are impacting on its wildlife. In frogs, in wombats, in bandicoots, in wallabies, in devils, in seals, in birds. We’re trying to maintain threatened species in the face of viral infections, parasitic infections, fungal infections. You’ve got to ask yourself the question, why, why all of a sudden do we have all this pathogen stress on wildlife? Because it’s not saying there’s a relationship necessarily with other factors but it’s saying, you’ve got to put all the cards on the table to work out what is going on here.
Of course, you’re looking in the lens of your own experience and I’ve been here since 1980 and wildlife was really just a small hobby sideline area of investigation. But Tasmania does have a lot of wildlife. It’s beautiful wildlife. It can be extremely useful for all sorts of reasons. But in the last thirty years we’re seeing a range of new diseases coming into our wildlife populations. And it’s impacting on their survival. And with the continuations of the habitat fragmentation and habitat destruction that I was telling you about earlier, this is causing these animals to be under more stress. So the diseases are transmitting more easily in some cases. Stress factors, exposure to chemicals, exposure to other things within the environment may be tipping the balance towards disease expression rather than seeing animals healthy and stable and, you know, not showing these overt infections that they’re showing in Tasmania now.
As a result of, you know, the interest we’ve, we’ve got in trying to join up the dots around the ecology, toxicity and disease expression, both in humans and wildlife populations, a group of scientists and community thinkers have got together through the Environment Tasmania to set up an eco-toxicology research fund. Which will be a private funding organ, organ that will allow for us to do some of the, the critical research to plug the gaps in knowledge that we think need to be plugged in Tasmania.
This person just by dint of her doggedness, length of time she’s spent doing it, they would have to think deep down in their own psyche that she might be banging on about something that they need to take seriously.
So you’d better start to at least apply what you say you want to apply as the precautionary principle. Allow the research to be done to prove that Tasmania is clean, green and clever. And disease free and residue free and it’s open for business and it’s pristine. It’s one thing to have the rhetoric, let’s make it a reality that we can all live with and be happy living with.
Do I think Tasmania’s clean, green and pristine? No, I don’t. I wish it was. I’d like it to perhaps be a place where our children will feel healthy and happy and sustained by the healthy ecology and the good economy that we can make out of the place. But if we continue to do what we’re doing to it, we will destroy it and we will destroy the wildlife, the biodiversity and we’ll probably destroy public health as well.
Alison shows the community leadership but we need the political leadership to acknowledge that she is respected and that her science needs to be tested. And it will give the community a great reassurance that Tasmania is not closed. It’s open and it wants to engage in understanding what’s going on in Tasmania.
Read the Transcript of Part1, HERE
