M5 East Stack health report rejected as "a sick joke"

Local community group, RAPS (Residents Against Polluting 
Stacks) has rejected the findings of a report into the health 
effects experienced by people round the M5 stack in Sydney as a 
"sick joke".

The report, released late on April Fool's day by NSW Health, 
claimed there was "no evidence of an association between the 
prevalence of eye, nose and throat symptoms and modelled 
emissions from the M5 East stack", based on a random phone 
survey, and therefore "no justification for any further 
investigations". It followed on from an earlier report released 
in November, where internal NSW Health documents showed that "the 
experienced allergy, respiratory medicine and occupational 
medicine physicians examining affected residents, were convinced 
of prima facie evidence of adverse health effects related to the 
vent stack".

After two years of fighting to get the Health Department to 
investigate residents' complaints, members of RAPS are very 
disappointed and angry. RAPS has pointed to a number of 
fundamental problems with the survey. People were only allowed to 
give yes/no answers about a limited range of symptoms over just 
the previous four weeks. Some of the residents surveyed had just 
come back from holidays, others had just been put onto stronger 
medication, yet they had to say they had no ill effects from the 
stack during the study period. Children were excluded from the 
study, and despite RAPS's requests, local doctors' opinions were 
not sought.

They used average annual exposures to stack pollutants to 
determine what levels of pollutants residents had been exposed to 
during the month of the study. "This is like saying that because 
Sydney gets an average 1200mm of rain a year, we will get 100mm 
of rain this month", said Mark Curran of RAPS.

RAPS has demanded the withdrawal of the report.

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RAPS may be contacted through:
Mark Curran 02 9558 8863;
Charles Briers 0405 808 695;
or Giselle Mawer 0411 107153