Spain's Lethal "Cooking Oil"

By B.J. Phillips

Mysterious contaminant has killed 132, sickened some 13,000

The first doctor to see little Fredy Garcia was the family pediatrician in the Madrid suburb of Alcorcon. Fredy was suffering from a low-grade fever that occasionally returned to normal; the doctor diagnosed simple laryngitis and sent the six-year-old home to take antibiotics.

Three days later, Fredy's mother Antonia was running a slight fever too. She took her son to the Hospital Clinico in Madrid's University City, and physicians there promptly admitted both mother and child. Nearly two weeks later, Fredy's mother left the hospital completely cured, but the boy was in intensive care with acute respiratory problems. In a desperate attempt to reverse the strange malady that had struck him, doctors changed his entire blood supply. On June 15, Fredy died. He was the 40th victim of a mysterious disease apparently transmitted by contaminated cooking oil that has killed 132 Spaniards and sickened another 13,000 since it was discovered five months ago.

The first death occurred on May 1, when Jaime Vaquero Garcia, 8, died in Torrejon de Ardoz, near Madrid. His five brothers and sisters also suffered from signs and symptoms that were soon to become all too familiar--severe muscular pain, fever, skin rashes and impaired nerve function--but all of them survived.

The syndrome, somewhat similar to viral pneumonia, was at first dismissed by Spanish health authorities as a simple outbreak of "atypical" pneumonia. But Dr. Antonio Muro-Fernandez, director of Spain's National Center for Infectious Diseases, challenged that diagnosis. He thought people were dying from a hitherto unknown disease, not caused by virus-like organisms, and he was alarmed that the killer ailment would soon sweep the country. For his pains, Muro-Fernandez was suspended from duty, allegedly because he was suffering from "stress and exhaustion."

His warning was prophetic. The number of cases quickly mounted. No cure was at hand. Rumors of its causes swept the country, particularly in Spain's Old Castile and other central provinces, where the outbreak was most severe. At one point, it was reported that strawberries and green vegetables might be responsible. Sales of asparagus and strawberries plummeted, and thousands of pounds of both had to be destroyed. Other rumors blamed birds, dogs and cats for the contamination, and frantic families put hundreds of pets to death. Because the first cases were reported near the U.S. airbase at Torrejon de Ardoz, people even talked about an accidental leak from American chemical warfare weapons which they be lieve are stored at the base. Spanish officials laughed off such charges. Said one: "If this is the most toxic germ weapon the Americans can manufacture, I don't think their enemies have much to fear."

By mid-June, the acting director of the Nino Jesus Children's Hospital in Madrid had established the first firm lead on the cause of the illness. By painstakingly analyzing his patients' diets, Dr. Juan Manuel Tabuenca discovered that the one common factor was foods cooked in a product billed as pure oh've oil. It was then found that the product was not so pure, but rather an unsavory mixture of olive oil, liquefied pork fat and colsa, or rapeseed oil. The oil, originally imported from

France for industrial use, had been reprocessed and sold to consumers for cooking.

Enterprising Spanish importers figured they would find another market for the oil by reversing the "denaturing" process that had transformed it into industrial oil, simultaneously making it unfit for human consumption. Apparently, some distributors botched the reversal process and unwittingly created a deadly poison. But the adulterated oil was already on the market, being peddled by door-to-door salesmen who unsuspectingly offered their lethal wares as a bargain for hard-pressed families. At about $5.50 for a 5-gal. plastic container, the oil cost 25% less than a comparable amount of olive oil.

Though it seems clear to Spanish medical authorities that improperly processed rapeseed oil is the culprit, doctors are still baffled about the precise cause of the strange malady. Samples analyzed so far have contained a number of foreign compounds, among them aniline, azobenzene, and anilide oils. But none of them has previously given rise to the symptoms common to the Spanish epidemic. Similarly, a number of treatments--ranging from megadoses of vitamin E to antibiotics and cortisone--have been tried, but no effective remedy has been found. Researchers were also puzzled by the fact that the disease struck some members of a family and left others unaffected, even though everyone was eating the same food.

An official of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control who has been monitoring the search for a cause--and possibly a cure--admits that epidemiologists are still in the dark. Said Dr. Peter Patriarca: "To our knowledge, an illness like this has never been associated with cooking oil or, for that matter, with any kind of food. Some chemicals found in these oils should not be there, but they've never been connected with an illness like this. There is something else that we just can't pin down, and as long as we don't know what the underlying cause is, we can't treat the disease."

The outlook thus remains bleak. A concerted government campaign has begun to remove the contaminated oil from the market (Spanish consumers were offered free olive oil in exchange for the suspect brands). But it may be too late to catch all of the tainted oil. Besides, Spaniards use cooking oil at a rate of 800,000 tons a year, even for canning vegetables, preserving meats, and baking. These preserved foodstuffs, put up in nobody knows how many Spanish cupboards, could prove to be time bombs. --ByBJ. Phillips.

Reported by Jane Walker/Madrid

With reporting by Jane Walker/Madrid

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