The Truth about Mad Cow Disease
By Joel Horst
Let the media mention a "mad cow" and panic ensues. People are afraid that if they eat meat from a "mad cow", they will the contract the human form of the disease, new variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (nvCJD). And yet, in spite of what the scientists will tell you, Mad Cow Disease, also known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (BSE) may not be as dangerous as thought.
In 1984, a representative from the British Ministry of Agriculture, Fish, and Forestry came to Mark Purdey's farm in Somerset, UK. He told the organic farmer that he, along with many other farmers in the UK, was required to apply a chemical wormer, Phosmet, which was an organophosphate (OP), to his cows as part of a warble fly eradication program. (Warble flies burrow into the backs and spinal canals of cattle. The holes they make in the hide lower the hide's value.1) But, as Purdey later said, "Studies had indicated that there was a chance that OP residues could contaminate cows' milk after treatment. I was also arguing that these chemicals would cause long-term delayed neuro-toxic damage to susceptible types of cows and humans who were exposed… I was aware that if cattle were undergoing simultaneous treatment with fly repellents or worm drenches, as well as the OP warblecide, this could affect the balance in the animal's chemistry. I was also concerned for the welfare of my wife, Margaret, who was then pregnant as there had been cases where farmers' wives had miscarried after coming into contact with OPs."2 Purdey wouldn't apply the wormer, and ended up going to court for an exception.
The UK government was unique in compelling a substantially higher biannual dose of this OP by comparison with the few other countries around the world that were following similar, less intensive measures to control this fly.3 Furthermore, while phosmet is used in other countries to control lice, it is used twice as strong for warble treatment as for lice treatment.
Two years later, an epidemic of mad cow disease swept through the UK. Meat and bone meal was implicated. Supposedly, brains from sheep infected with scrapie, the sheep version of BSE, were turned into meat meal, mixed in cattle feeds, and the scrapie had induced BSE in cows. Furthermore, the government scientists hypothesized, when humans ate the nervous system of the infected cows, the humans would get CJD. Never mind that humans generally eat steaks, roasts, and ground beef, not cow brains. Never mind that the people of Shetland had been eating potted sheep's brain for years—brains taken from scrapie infested sheep— and not one Shetlander had contracted CJD. Never mind that the US was milling scrapie brains into its cattle feed, and the US remained BSE-free.
The media ranted, howled, and screamed about the epidemic. Other countries blocked imports of UK beef. Britain commanded that the infected cows be slaughtered. The cattle industry in the UK went through the floor.
Purdey began researching the cause of mad cow disease. He noted that the feed that supposedly caused the epidemic had also been shipped to a number of other countries, none of which had had any BSE epidemics. Furthermore, US scientists had fed and injected cows with large amounts of scrapie-contaminated brain tissue, yet the cows had not gotten BSE. And even after the banning of meat and bone meal in the feed, thirty thousand cattle developed BSE.4
Part of the answer seemed to lie in the malformed proteins — known as prions — that had been found in the nervous systems of BSE-infected cattle. Purdey wondered if the phosmet — which is poured on along the spine, inches away from the backbone and the prion protein, on the holes made by the warbles — could be causing the malformation. So, with the help of other concerned people, he got money together to finance a study at the department of Neuroscience, Institute of Psychiatry in London. Living tissue culture cells which express the prion protein were exposed to low doses of the OP chemical, so as to simulate the context of a living cow undergoing OP treatment. And sure enough, the chemical did change the protein in such a way that would have made a cow more susceptible to BSE.
But the organophosphate was not the whole answer. It seemed that a missing Factor X was also responsible. So Purdey set out on a global trek to visit and analyze the unique environments where transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE, the collective name for BSE and its relatives) had erupted as high incidence clusters for years. After analyzing the world's most clear-cut TSE cluster zones in Colorado, Iceland, Slovakia, Calabria and Sardinia, where an assortment of animals and humans had developed TSE at exceptionally high rates, he found a common factor — extra-high manganese levels in the soil, and, as he puts it, "rockbottom levels of copper, selenium and zinc." At every place, he found that the high levels of manganese were linked to the atmospheric fallout of a naturally occurring or industrial source of combusted manganese oxide, stemming from volcanic, acid rain; steel, glass, ceramic, dye and munitions factories; lead-free gasoline refineries; the take-off airspace beyond airports, and the like. Some places had high levels of silver instead of manganese. This came from "cloud seeding" with silver iodide for inducing rainfall, snowfall and cloud or fog dispersion near ski resorts, airport runways, reservoirs, and the like.
Purdey teamed up with Dr. David Brown at Cambridge, a widely published biochemist who had pursued his groundbreaking studies on the elusive prion protein. They found that in a healthy brain, the prion bonds to copper, and this copper-protein combination can have an antioxidant effect. They also found that manganese and silver could bond to the prion in the absence of copper. This produced the key prion malformation which the wormer had not. Further studies by Case Western University and a French team of scientists on the brains of those who had died of CJD found low copper and high manganese levels in the brain.
After researching further, Purdey realized that all the places he had visited had high levels of ultra-violet (UV) reflection, whether from snow, lots of white concrete, white sandstone terrain, or the like. Experimentation found that when there were high manganese levels in the brain, the manganese stored up the energy from the UV light that entered the eyes, whereas the copper in a healthy brain acted as a conductor and spread out the energy through the body. The UV also changed the manganese into a deadly form. Eventually, the prions would explode and send cluster bombs of harmful free radical chain reactions in the nervous system, leading to TSE.
Purdey and Brown are not alone in their stand. Professor Bounias, from Avignon, France, studied organophosphates also and saw the exact same correlation between OP use and BSE in his own country as in Britain. 5 There is also the research of Drs. Anthony and Benjamin Parish, who found that BSE was not a pathogenic disease, and was aggravated by wormers.6
Purdey's research, however, met with resistance from the British Ministry of Animals, Fish, and Forestry. The British Scientific Steering Committee threw out Purdey's research as being "unscientific" and "only a hypothesis".7 (Never mind that what they claim to be the cause is also a hypothesis.) The government has repeatedly thrown out his work.8
The conclusion of Purdey's research is that BSE does not "jump" from sheep to cattle or from cattle to humans. Instead, BSE is the result of a combination of OPs, high manganese/low copper diets, and high levels of UV light.
Furthermore, whatever the cause of mad cow disease, it does not affect animals under about two years old, so all cuts of meat (other than ground beef) are safe, as they come from younger animals. However, for optimum safety, buy only pasture-raised meats from producers who do not use organophosphate wormers on their animals.
At Jehovah-Jireh Farm, we do not feed animal by-products to our beef animals, nor do we use organophosphate wormers.
References:
1 "Botfly"
http://www.encylopedia.com/html/b1/botfly.asp
2. "The BSE Inquiry: Statement of Mark Purdey"
http://www.whale.to/w/purdey2.html
3. "Animal Pharm" by Mark Purdey
http://www.westonaprice.org/myths_truths/myths_truths_mad.html
4. Ibid.
5. "Educating Rida" by Mark Purdey
http://www.westonaprice.org/myths_truths/myths_truths_mad2.html
6. "BSE: the chemical connection" by Drs. Anthony and Benjamin Parish
http://www.whale.to/w/bse1.html
7. "EU Scientific Steering Committee on phosmet: Opinion on possible links between BSE and Organophosphates used
as pesticides against ecto- and endoparasites in cattle"
www.mad-cow.org/~tom/leuco.html
8. "The BSE Inquiry: statement of Mark Purdey"
http://www.whale.to/w/purdey2.html
