Aluminium Precaution Notice

Nicholas Albery

The majority view is that, outside an industrial setting, aluminium normally presents no health hazard, but it is nevertheless disturbing that many manufacturers continue routinely and unnecessarily to add aluminium to their products (for instance to some indigestion medicines) and that some water boards outside London add aluminium during the purification process.

My fear is that, as in the case of lead in petrol, it could be at least a decade before the minority scientific warnings are generally accepted, and before the powers that be take adequate precautions, whilst manufacturers and the scientists in their pay or under their sway, will fight a strong rearguard action.

Aluminium is just one example. In our high technology society, there will inevitably be an increasing number of instances of this nature, and the response of government will characteristically be one of years of delay whilst they ponder the issue through commissions of investigation.

My proposal is that some non-governmental organisation of repute should take upon itself to publicise 'Precaution Notices' early on in such cases. These notices would summarise the research results to date, would name the products on the market which contained the suspect compound and equivalent products which did not, and would advise what other precautions concerned members of the public should take. It might also be possible to publicise a 'Reliability Quotient' which would indicate what percentage of the relevant independent scientific community felt that the research findings were sufficiently cogent to justify taking precautions (in the case of aluminium, the Reliability Quotient would still be low at this point, probably under 35%).

Postscripts