He says experts said at the time it would take 20 years for the effects to be known, adding: “It is now nearly 20 years.”Graham Sillifant says his wife, Sarah, who was in her twenties when she was exposed to the water, hanged herself last year after suffering dementia and other similar symptoms to Mrs Cross. But research published by the British Medical Journal concluded that the “poisoning probably led to long-term cerebral impairment in some people in Camelford”.The authority was prosecuted, but merely fined £10,000, and paid out just £400,000 in compensation, shared between 148 victims.Campaigners now hope that the increasing evidence that Mrs Cross died from a strange disease as a result of the pollution will reawaken public concern.Doug Cross, her husband, believes that 20 other people have died as a result of the disaster and that more cases are emerging. Confidential documents show that the authority and the Conservative government were deeply concerned that the incident would endanger the then impending water privatisation.Hundreds of people complained of skin burns, rashes, ulcers, sore mouths and joints, memory loss and other symptoms , which they attributed to the aluminium and other metals that the chemical had dissolved from supply pipes.Their complaints were dismissed after controversial inquiries held by the water authority and by the Department of Health. Residents sounded the alarm after drinking or bathing in the foul-tasting water and after suffering weird effects that included skin peeling off their backs, hands and lips sticking together and fingernails and hair turning blue.Official evidence obtained by the IoS shows that levels of aluminium reached 5,000 times the safety limit.Yet the South West Water Authority, which then ran the works, was slow to investigate the cause of the problem and continued to insist that the water was safe to drink.

This caused “massive and almost instantaneous contamination of the water supply”. One severely affected woman has already committed suicide.The tragedy began when a driver poured 20 tons of the highly caustic chemical into the wrong tank at the Lowermoor water treatment works that serves the town. Other victims with similar symptoms to Mrs Cross fear that they may follow her to the grave. The victims of Britain’s worst drinking water pollution disaster are beginning to die of mysterious diseases, an Independent on Sunday investigation has revealed.

The revelation, which follows the adjournment of an inquest on one of the victims after the coroner became concerned that the victim may have been poisoned, will refocus attention on the twin scandals of the original incident and the subsequent cover-up.
Carole Cross died after years of illness that followed taking a bath in water heavily polluted by aluminium sulphate, which was poured into the water supply of the small Cornish town of Camelford in 1988.High levels of aluminium were found in parts of her brain, and a scientific paper due to be published soon is expected to confirm that her death appears to be linked to the incident.Campaigners believe that more of the 20,000 people exposed to the polluted water have died as a result. Conservationists aim to double the UK hare population to around two million by 2010.. HARE Hunting and habitat loss led to a 75 per cent decline in their numbers by the 1990s. Became extinct across most of England, but in the past few years there have been signs of recovery in the South.

They remained equally bullish in 2004 when she sacked Mirror editor Piers Morgan for publishing fake pictures of British soldiers abusing Iraqis.Bailey appeared to perfect a balancing act in which she sacrificed editorial ambition for commercial progress. She accepted circulation decline as an occupational hazard and accused media commentators of being “obsessed” by a statistic that is a poor indicator of financial health.After she left her Roman Catholic grammar school in east London, Bailey’s first job was as a shop assistant. In 1984 she moved into advertising sales for The Guardian before winning a junior managerial job at The Independent. From there she took the step that gave her career wings when she joined the magazine publishing company IPC. She became a member of its board at 31.From 1997 to 1999 she was chief executive of IPC’s television magazine division, overseeing a record market share for its titles What’s on TV, TV Times and TV & Satellite Week.