-Caveat Lector-
Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2000 8:17 PM
Subject: Mad cow
> Sustainable Agriculture Network Discussion Group
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 23:29:29 +0900
> Subject: Copper-bottomed answer to mad cow disease?
>
> The Guardian Weekly 30-11-2000
>
> Copper-bottomed answer to mad cow disease?
>
> There may be a simple explanation for BSE, argues George Monbiot
>
> The most interesting aspect of France's BSE scandal is that it makes no
> sense
> at all. Britain stopped exporting contaminated cattle feed to Europe in
> 1991
> (though it continued sending it to the third world until 1996). In most
> other
> European Union countries cases have already peaked and declined, as
> expected.
> But in France the number of infected animals has doubled in the past
> year. It
> is impossible to see how this pattern could result from the export of
> British
> bone meal.
>
> The transmission of BSE has never been satisfactorily explained by the
> prevailing theory. The consumption of meat and bone meal from infected
> cows
> has doubtless played an important role. Yet this alone fails to account
> for
> the huge numbers of cattle in Britain that continued to become infected
> after
> most contaminated feed had been removed from the food chain. The latest
> research on the human form of the disease, vCJD, published four weeks
> ago,
> failed to find any link with the consumption of infected beef.
>
> You might imagine that when its theory isn't working, a government
> would wish to test the alternatives. But the British government has
> so far sought only to attack a hypothesis that does appear to fit the
> facts.
> Since 1988 a Somerset farmer, Mark Purdey, has been arguing that
> scientists
> have overlooked the root causes of BSE. Self-taught and self-financed,
> he has
> studied the brain's complex biochemical pathways, and this year
> published a
> groundbreaking paper in a respected medical journal. His reward is to
> have
> been reviled, misrepresented and physically attacked.
>
> Prions, the brain proteins whose alteration seems to be responsible
> for BSE, are designed to protect the brain from the oxidising
> properties of chemicals activated by dangerous agents such as
> ultraviolet light, Purdey argues. When, he suggests, the prion
> proteins are exposed to too little copper and too much manganese, the
> manganese takes the place of the copper that the prion normally binds
> to. The
> protein becomes distorted and loses its function.
>
> BSE arose in British herds in the 80s, Purdey asserts, because the
> Ministry of Agriculture started forcing all cattle farmers to treat
> their animals with an organophosphate pesticide called phosmet, at
> far higher doses than are used elsewhere in the world. The pesticide had
> to
> be poured along the line of the spinal cord. Phosmet, Purdey has shown,
> captures copper. At the same time cattle feed was being supplemented
> with
> chicken manure, from birds dosed with manganese to increase their egg
> yield.
> The prion proteins in the cows' brains were both deprived of copper and
> dosed
> with manganese. In France the use of phosmet first became mandatory in
> Brittany. Twenty of France's initial 28 cases of BSE emerged there.
> BSE's
> subsequent spread, Purdey maintains, mirrors the use of the pesticide.
>
> Poisoning by similar means may explain the distribution of the human
> form of
> the disease. Of the two main clusters of vCJD in Britain one, in Kent,
> is in
> the middle of a fruit- and hop-growing area where huge quantities of
> organophosphates and manganese-based fungicides are used. The other is
> in
> Queniborough in Leicestershire, whose dyeworks (until they caught fire a
> few
> years ago, spraying chemicals over the village) used to dump some of
> their
> residues into the sewerage system, Purdey alleges. The sewage was spread
> over
> the fields. Dyeworks use shedloads of manganese.
>
> Purdey has tested his theory on BSE and CJD clusters in Iceland, the
> United
> States, Slovakia and Sardinia. He found that people and
> animals had been exposed to deficiencies of copper and surfeits of
> manganese. Most of the clusters, intriguingly, are in mountainous
> areas, where levels of ultraviolet light are high.
>
> But the most compelling evidence in support of his hypothesis comes from
> a
> paper published by a team of biochemists at Cambridge University this
> year.
> They found that when copper was substituted by manganese in prion
> proteins,
> the prions adopted precisely the distinguishing features that identify
> the
> infective agent in BSE.
>
> If Purdey is right, he deserves a Nobel Prize for medicine. Instead
> he has been shot at, his phone lines have been cut, and his house has
> been burned down. The Ministry of Agriculture, which for 50 years has
> had a
> dangerously close relationship with the agrochemical industry, has
> repeatedly
> sought to discredit him. Suddenly, however, its tone has changed, and it
> has
> now promised to start funding his research. The families of the French
> victims of CJD are threatening to sue the British government, and it
> desperately needs an alternative transmission theory.
>
> With funding on its way, and new evidence accumulating every month, a
> self-educated dairy farmer may be about to overturn the entire body of
> scientific research on the biggest public health scandal of modern
> times.
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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