AN INQUIRY has been announced to investigate whether clouds of tracer chemicals pumped across south Hampshire 45 years ago may have posed health risks.

It will be headed by Professor Peter Lachmann, president of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He will have a small team of experts to help him, the government announced.

Peter Kilfoyle, a junior Cabinet Office minister, said the review should be completed "within the next few months'' and its report would be published.

His review was announced just over a week after details were published of experiments at an airfield near Beaulieu in 1953 and 1954 to test Britain's vulnerability to a chemical warfare attack. Clouds of the chemical zinc cadmium sulphide were sprayed in 50-mile arcs from Beaulieu, northwards near Southampton and Winchester, and eastwards towards Shaftesbury, Dorset.

The trials were carried out by scientists at Porton Down, the chemical and biological defence establishment near Salisbury, to test how clouds of chemicals would behave if used to attack Britain, and what defences could be used against them.

The Ministry of Defence insisted that zinc cadmium sulphide, the fluorescent particle used, was harmless but said it would go ahead with plans for an independent inquiry to demonstrate this.

A similar inquiry has already been held into the use of dead bacteria in parallel field trials off the Dorset coast in the 1960s to prepare against the possibility of biological attack. It concluded there was no discernible link between exposure to the bacteria and ill health but said there was a slight chance that people with certain medical conditions might have found them aggravated.

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