http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/science/science-britain-cause.html
SOMERSET, England (Reuters) - Mark Purdey still eats beef,
even “junk” in pies and hamburgers, and he has no fear that he or his wife or
six children will be struck down by the deadly human form of mad cow disease. “It’s an absolute myth,” the 48-year-old
organic farmer says, banging his fist on a large wooden table to underline his
argument that much of the accepted logic on bovine spongiform encephalopathy,
or BSE (news - web sites ), is wrong.
His story unfolds—a 16-year campaign to explore the effect
of organophosphates, the chemicals he believes are behind the spread of the brain-wasting
disease in cattle and in people.
Purdey says we should distance ourselves from “the men in
bow-ties” who
have what he calls a monopoly on thought.
Forget the role of tainted animal feed in spreading BSE
among cattle or infected meat in passing the disease to humans as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease (news - web sites) (vCJD). Look
instead at the use of systemic organophosphates, derived from military nerve
gas, which the UK agriculture ministry told farmers to pour along the spine of
their cattle in the early 1980s to kill a parasite called the warble fly.
And those used in sprays used in Britain’s countryside.
“I have been hammering the establishment theory, the
so-called
meat-and-bone
meal theory, since 1988 or 1989. Even then I had identified
that meat and
bone meal had been sold all over the world, particularly
the Middle East,” he says.
“If you’re blaming this stuff and you’re sending it all
over the world, why on earth aren’t you getting more BSE?”
He agrees that other scientists would argue it has yet to
appear because
of
the long incubation period of disease, believed to be caused
by a mutated
prion protein in the brain.
But Purdey argues there is little logic in the theory. He also disputes the argument that BSE is
passed to humans via infected beef.
“If it was to do with eating beef we’d have lots of cases
in towns, where most burger bars are, but 60 percent of cases are in rural
areas,” he said.
“Most victims live by fields, where crops are sprayed.”
A self-taught scientist, Purdey says he acted first on “intuition,”
refusing to treat his 60 cows with the organophosphate, called phosmet, and going
on to win a court battle with the agriculture ministry to make his point.
When BSE was first detected in a British herd in 1986, he
immediately thought phosmet was the problem—a theory which after years of
unpaid research has now won respect from senior scientists, public figures and
politicians. “Like most things it was instinct.
Being a farmer, I was horrified when I was approached by a ministry official to
treat a cow for warble fly by pouring this chemical along the spinal cord and
the base of the head,” he said.
“It was an oil designed to seep through the skin and to
change the entire internal environment of the cow into a poisonous medium to
kill off the parasites.”
Purdey began to trawl through books and do field research. He looked at the clusters of BSE in Britain,
clusters of deer and elk in the United States with a similar illness called
chronic wasting disease, and villages where many people were dying of the more
common Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (news - web sites).
“I went on the road,” he said, describing trips to the
United States, Slovakia, Calabria in Italy and Iceland.
“To me it was clearly something in the environment that
was igniting these illnesses. But what was this factor?”
He found one common factor—high levels of manganese, a
metal given to cattle in high doses via the organophosphate. “What I found in the environment was
supported by the laboratory,” he said, describing tests by David Brown, a
neurobiologist at Cambridge University.
Purdey explains the prion would normally bond with copper
and carry it around the brain to destroy free radicals. But if lacking copper,
the prion bonds with another metal—manganese, which stops the prion from
folding properly.
He did soil analysis on the areas near clusters of vCJD in
Britain and
found
high levels of manganese from crop spraying. He concluded
the doses of
manganese intensifies the traditional illness, giving vCJD
the potency to
kill younger people.
Funding Required
Now all he wants is funding for more research—something
that Agriculture Minister Nick Brown says may be ready in May after a scientist
has reviewed all work into the origins of BSE.
“In the BSE inquiry there is a caveat that it is not clear
whether organophosphates could have been a contributory factor...it leaves the door
open on organophosphates,” Brown told Reuters.
But Purdey is worried that the funding may never come.
“No one’s prepared to admit it because it would involve
massive
compensation,” he said. “By keeping the causal agent as
something
mystified, no one’s to blame.”
From me...
More info here..
http://eionews.addr.com/epaper/eio001213.htm
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