Toxic Oil Syndrome: The Perspective after 20 Years

• Manuel Posada de la Paz ^[1] ; Rossanne M. Philen ^[2] ; Ignacio Abaitua Borda ^[1]
  1. [1] Centro de Investigación sobre el Sindrome del Aceite Tóxico, Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Madrid, Spain.
  2. [2] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Public Health Service, US Department of Health and Human Services, Atlanta, GA.
• Localización: Epidemiologic reviews, ISSN 0193-936X, ISSN-e 1478-6729, Vol 23, 2, 2001, págs. 231-247
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In 1981, a progressive multisystem disease, later called toxic oil syndrome, abruptly broke out in epidemic proportions in central and northwestern Spain (1). This previously unknown syndrome affected thousands of people, and several hundred deaths were attributed to toxic oil syndrome.

    As a result of this epidemic, the Spanish national health system was faced with one of the most critical public health problems of this century. Although certain clinical characteristics of toxic oil syndrome resembled those of other diseases such as scleroderma and graft-versus-host disease, a similar disease had never before been seen, and its effects on the public and the medical community were dramatic.

    Twenty years later many questions about this epidemic remain unresolved (2).

    Toxic oil syndrome resulted from the consumption of rapeseed oil that had been denatured with 2 percent aniline for industrial use, subsequently refined, and then illicitly sold as pure olive oil (3). To date, the causal toxic agent remains unknown, as many substances which could potentially be the causative compound have been found in the implicated oils (4, 5).

    Adulterated oils have contributed to serious epidemics in the past, such as one in Morocco in 1959 due to ortho-cresyl phosphate contamination of jet aircraft oil, which was fraudulently sold as food oil (6), and the one that occurred in Japan in 1968 from the accidental contamination of rice oil with polychlorinated biphenyls (6, 7). The toxic oil syndrome epidemic represents a unique episode of intoxication, however, since in this case the oil was known to be unfit for human consumption because of denaturation with aniline.