How Can One Sleep Hearing Holy-Inquisition-Style Sri Lankan Discourses?

By Chandre Dharmawardana –AUGUST 18, 2018

Dr. Chandre Dharmawardana

How can one sleep hearing holy-Inquisition-style Sri Lankan discourses? – Reply to Grusha Andrews’ wet dream on glyphosate

I am glad that Grusha Andrews (GA) has given me another opportunity to discuss agrochemicals and the scientific approach to the elucidation of causative factors of ill health and disease. The readers may note Grusha Andrews’ tone of the holy Inquisitor, nay of the Nazi Sturmabteilung in dealing with myself, Dr. Anuruddha Padeniaya, Venerable Athuraliye Ratana, Dr. Channa Jayasumana an others. Did she wake up from her glyphosic dream after reading my article in the Colombo Telegraph entitled “Can A California Jury Decide If A Pesticide Caused Gardener Johnson’s Cancer?”, on 13th August 2018.

Goebblesian Invective

I am labeled a “a specimen of a ‘scientist’ who is using scientific jargon to advocate cancer, chronic kidney disease and death to Sri Lankans. I am said to be a descendant of the Nazis who performed trials on captured Jews, the Caucasians who trialled gynaecological instruments on Negro women without anaesthesia or their consents – (sic) – having the immoral audacity to consistently advocate to ‘lesser humans’ what they protect themselves from in their countries of residence”. I am also said to be a “quasi scientist”. 

Grusha Andrews is the very opposite of all that. She is the White American or Shining knight who came to defeat the Nazis and save the free world. The female Chevalier-Garter of the Thistle- is also called a Knight. Having whipped herself into a lather of righteous indignation befitting an  executioner of the Holy Inquisition about to  torch heretics, Grusha Andrews goes for more victims. Calling names may have been the war cry of barbarians. 

Dr. Padeniya is declared “a noncompoop-hood”. Lady GA turns to Ven. Athureliye Ratana and present him (without the “Ven.”)  as an extremist Buddhist monk defecating in a pit in  Lady GA’s  mind. She is the very epitome of moderation. She upends this verbal diarrhea claiming that “the idiocy of Padeniya , Jayasumana et al.  (sic) does not absolve Chandre Dharmawardana and his team of devil’s advocates from their criminality towards the human beings of Sri Lanka”- she forgot the earthworms!  

Indeed, this crusader now moves to reveal what she thinks is the  miserable motive of this devil’s team – filthy lucre! They  “risk generations of humans to fatten the pockets …  the likes of Dharmawardana till a 20 year  prospective study is completed?” However, before burning the agents of Satan, Lady GA must right the realm of her fellow Knight, Sir Bradford Hill! 

I disagree completely with Venerable Ratana, Dr. Jayasumana, Dr. Padeniaya and others, but  have never used such contemptible language against them in my writings. They, like Grusha Andrews, are all part of the frightened public who believe that they are fighting a holy war against rapacious global agricultural giants and their agents. They think that their plate of food, and their glass of water are poisoned by agrochemicals and see the mote of glyphosate residues but not the toxic beam of fossil fuel residues. They hang on fake science or Natha Deiyyo to rationalize their fear. If medieval people believed that evil spirits caused disease, today’s bogey bugs  are the agrochemicals said to be present “everywhere”! Scientists who favour any use of agrochemicals are tar-brushed as “paid agents of agro-companies” as in Dr. Jayasumana’s scurrilous book  “Wakugadu Hatana”.

This discourse is increasingly fascist, insinuating those who hold opposite opinions to be ‘dirty jews working for big business and against the Fatherland’. Today in Sri Lanka, there are Shining Knights hurling unsubstantiated accusations from every corner. They judge others by their standards. Indeed, how can one sleep, when this type of  crude discourse is more and more current, with Jayasumana and Grusha Andrews common bedfellows. 

Bradford Hill criteria for identifying causative agents of diseases

When I discuss environmental science, food technology etc. with colleagues and students, ‘what is healthy’, and “what causes what” invariably come up. In physics, the concept of cause is obsolete, but not in epidemiology. The Bardford Hill approach is best for students without much mathematics. Those with a mastery of mathematics can construct a mathematical model, and  immediately discover the redundancies and errors in the Bradford Hill criteria [these are exposed by a factor-group analysis, also called an eigenvector analysis – indeed, we need the ‘jargon’ to be precise ]. But GA has failed to see these and reproach  my alleged “cunning”.

The so-called biological gradient  criterion falls logically under my very first item, i.e., “Strength of association between so called ’cause and effect (disease)’. That is, when the dose of the causative agent increases, the chance of developing the disease, or the strength of the epidemic, increases proportionately.  

Thus countries which use a very large amount of agrochemicals and pesticides should show proportionately higher incidence of cancer, kidney and liver diseases if agrochemicals are involved. However, what is seen is a NEGATIVE CORRELATION. I gave the figures for several countries. The figures for New Zealand and USA are 1717 and 137 kg/hectare (2015 World bank data) respectively, while Qatar uses  over 7100 kg/hectare. Data for over 150 countries verify this negative correlation. Even within Sri Lanka, the highest use of glyphosate is in the Tea Estates, while the lowest  is in the paddy fields. Yet it is the paddy farmers who contract a kidney disease of unknown aetiology (CKDu), and in only certain Dry-Zone villages. In spite of this, the anti-industry lobby jumps to link CKDu with glyphosate use, although what we see is an ANTI-CORRELATION.  

A strong correlation with CKDu is found for people who drink stagnant water from household wells, many of which are high in fluoride, and contain hard water (i.e., having magnesium and calcium ions). A correlation does not establish a cause, but an anti-correlation eliminates a proposed cause. It is fluoride and magnesium together that satisfy the criteria for causing CKDu. For more details, see my research paper published in the Journal of Environmental Geochemistry, volume 40, p 705  (2017), and references therein.

All such science is  irrelevant to our  Crusader. Lady GA draws me over the burning coals claiming I cunningly neglected “temporality” in my list. She elucidates “temporality” for the uninitiated by saying that “the longer a person is exposed to the causative agent the higher the chance of developing the disease”. Contrary to Bardford Hill’s position, I recommend that the first seven tests be applied first, and then, if successful one  moves to the time dependent tests (“temporality”) as toxico-kinetic studies are more difficult and expensive. That is why I skip it from my initial list for the evaluation of an aetiology. 

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