Mad Cow Disease - setting the record straight on BSE
Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis, or BSE, also called "Mad Cow Disease", has probably done more to change food regulations in Europe than any other threat or scandal over food-borne disease ever. Thousands of animals have been slaughtered in an effort to contain the "infection", but it appears that scientific facts do not bear out the official version of an infectuous prion protein that transmits the dreaded Creutzfeld Jacob Disease from farm animal to human eater of the steak or for that matter, from one cow to the next.
Much research has been done by Mark Purdey, a UK farmer with a scientific bent, who made the news in 1984, when he sued the government to gain exemption from treating his cattle with the - then mandatory - high dose systemic organophosphate poisons British farmers were ordered to dowse their cows with in a bid to eliminate the problem of warble fly larvae developing under their skins.
Scouting the four corners of the earth in search of "disease clusters", locations where mad cow disease is occurring in a concentration of cases and examining the environmental circumstances in these places, Purdey found a very simple solution to the riddle of BSE: a consistent pattern of mineral imbalances and a particular "activator" of the destructive effect in infra-sound, sometimes natural but often man-made. Purday details his findings in an excellent and easily readable article which should set the record straight on the cause of BSE.
Whether our authorities will listen or will continue to cling to the pharmaceutical paradigm of "infectuous" causation of BSE, remains to be seen. Be sure to read Purdey's article to the end. There are some surprising conclusions on economic interests involved in the suppression of the truth about BSE.
An interesting tidbit of information found on an ISIS Report - www.i-sis.org.uk
25 February 2005:
Which Science or Scientists Can You Trust?
Mark Purdey, a Somerset farmer turned epidemiologist, has produced detailed evidence to show that BSE was caused by farmers spreading Phosmetz, an organohosphate (OP), over the backs of cattle as a prophylaxis, but the Government's MRC Toxicology Unit - funded by the pharmaceutical company Zeneca - apparently refuted this theory. Which company held all rights over the production of Phosmetz? Zeneca. Whom do you believe?Since I wrote this article, Mark Purdey has died. His brother Nigel has edited this book providing a more permanent record of Mark's work.
Book: Animal Pharm by Mark Purdey
One Mans Struggle to Discover the Truth about Mad Cow Disease and Variant CJD
Mark Purdey's life changed one day in 1984 when a Ministry of Agriculture inspector told him he must administer a toxic organophosphate pesticide to his dairy herd.
Passionately committed to organic farming and convinced of the harmful effects of chemicals in the environment, he refused to comply.'It was as if my whole life became focused,' he explained later. Before they had a chance to prosecute, Purdey took the Ministry to Court and won his case.
These experiences caused him to challenge the orthodox line on the origins of Mad Cow Disease and its human counterpart, variant CJD. Could the insecticide used in the official programme have precipitated the disease? (http://www.markpurdey.com/)
Articles to see:Mark Purdey's excellent study (Educating Rida)
Organophosphates Implicated In Mad Cow Disease
BSE is not a transmissible disease
Possible CJD case in New Zealand
Eighth case of Mad Cow disease detected in Japan
Trace element (nutritional) theory of "mad cow" disease
Mad Cow Disease: A Case for Studying Living Animals - Red Flags Weekly
Insecticide Causes Mad Cow Disease?
How Now, Mad Cow?
By Diane Farsetta, AlterNet. Posted December 23, 2004.
One year after the first case of mad cow disease in the US was confirmed, promised food safety reforms have yet to be instituted. And they never will be, if the cattle industry has its way.Living Test for Mad Cow Disease
Jon Rappoport of nomorefakenews.com on Mad Cow Disease
MAD COW ONCE MORE
FEBRUARY 13, 2004. Since my latest round of analysis on the fake science behind Mad Cow, I’ve received some emails from angry doubters. Big deal. These proponents of the so-called PRION cause of Mad Cow, rather than proving their case, have seen fit to attack me and this site.
Needless to say, some of these critics are doctors. What they personally know about prions as disease agents could be placed on the head of a pin.
The critics also believe, a priori, that if I’m the only one who is attacking prions, I must be wrong. They ask me to produce other critiques of prions.
Here is one, written by Steven Milloy of the Cato Institute. I’m sure it will satisfy none of the critics. I print excerpts from Milloy’s piece because he makes good points, particularly when he discusses the traditional method of finding disease causes, called Koch’s postulates.
(One doctor who emailed me tried to argue that WE ALL KNOW prions are disease agents because a rare disease called kuru is caused by prions. Wow. What a dolt. Kuru was supposedly discovered by a scientist named Gadusek. He postulated a slow virus, not a prion, as the cause. Of course, Gadusek, who was later sent to jail for having sex with an underaged Micronesian boy, never actually isolated that virus. And prions are simply ASSUMED to be the cause of kuru.)
Okay. Here are the excerpts from Steven Milloy:
The prion theory has also been significantly propelled along by the fact that its developer, Dr. Stanley Pruisner (sp) (search) of the University of California at San Francisco, won a Nobel Prize for it in 1997.
Despite Pruisner’s Nobel Prize, however, it has not been scientifically established that prions cause any sort of disease ― a fact only reluctantly acknowledged by organizations such as the National Academy of Science’s National Research Council and the National Institutes of Health.
Despite almost 10 years of intense research into the causes and potential ramifications of mad cow disease, the prion theory still does not satisfy the basic scientific test known as Koch’s Postulates (search) for whether a particular microorganism, such as a prion, causes a specific disease, such as mad cow.
Developed by German physician and bacteriologist Robert Koch in 1890, the basic criteria of Koch’s Postulates as applied to the prion theory would be: (1) prions are present in every case of the mad cow disease; (2) prions must be isolated from a diseased cow and grown in pure culture; (3) mad cow disease should be reproduced when the cultured prions are inoculated into a healthy cow; and (4) the prion must be recoverable from the experimentally infected cow.
“The best-kept secret in this field is that [prions] in any form have never shown infectivity,” said the head of Yale University’s surgery department to the United Press International’s Steve Mitchell.There certainly have been a few exceptions to Koch’ Postulates, but no one has made a case for why prions might be another such exception.
Aside from the propulsion received by virtue of the Nobel Prize, Pruisner’s prion theory seems to have been accepted as the explanation for mad cow simply by default ― that is, no other explanations for mad cow and nvCJD have been developed.
It’s the same sort of shallow thinking that explains why the 150 nvCJD deaths are usually attributed to consumption of infected beef. There is, in fact, no evidence that the 150 victims of nvCJD even ate infected beef, but it is assumed they did because no other explanation has been developed for how they could have contracted nvCJD.
It’s not likely that more affirmative-natured explanations will be forthcoming anytime soon.
As the UPI’s Mitchell pointed out this week, virtually all of the $27 million the National Institutes of Health gave to researchers for work on mad cow-type diseases was directed toward prion theory research.
An NIH spokesmen told Mitchell that the reason for not allocating resources to non-prion research is that few researchers seem to be proposing that type of research.
Other researchers, including an anonymous NIH scientist, told Mitchell that the research community isn’t applying for grants because the agency is biased against non-prion theories and will reject applications for such research.
End of excerpt.
I also solicited a comment from Dr. Peter Duesberg. In conventional circles, Duesberg is known for having mapped the genetic structure of retroviruses. Since 1959, he has been a professor of molecular biology at U Cal Berkeley. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and was the recipient of a 7-year Outstanding Investigator Grant from NIH. Duesberg wrote me:
“The Prusiner-Weissman claim is that the “prion” is an infectious agent, made of protein. The protein has been isolated, like many, many others, but there is no evidence that it is infectious. However, there is not even any proof that it is pathogenic [disease-causing]. It has been introduced into the germline of mice, and these mice are doing well [not ill]---even in Prusiner’s and Weismann’s lab.”
Convinced yet? I didn’t think so.
You see, the gist of small minds is that they live by the principle: If the majority of experts say X is true, then it must be true. That is their signpost. That’s the god they pray to. Why should I interfere?
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Tuesday November 11 2003
updated on Wednesday November 24 2010URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2003/11/11/mad_cow_disease_setting_the_record_straight_on_bse.htm
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