On Sat, 25 Nov 2000 at 23:28:18 +0100, Oddmund Garvik wrote:
> Det er ikkje først og framst importforbod som må til, men eit intensivt
> testprogram. Noreg har importert livdyr i årevis, og har vel også nytta
> noko av dette fôret. I dag oppdaga ein eit tilfelle i Finisterre
> (Bretagne) på ei ku fødd i 1998, altså to år etter innføringa av
> forbodet mot animalsk dyrefôr i mjølke- og kjøtproduksjonen (storfe).
> Dette syner at smittekjeldene kan vera mange, og at smitten kanskje også
> kan gå i arv. Det er såleis all grunn til å vera kritisk og på vakt.
[...]
> Det er landbrukspolitikken som må leggjast om, saman med ein god del
> anna som heng saman - energipolitikk, transportpolitikk osb. Det er den
> intensive og industrielle utnyttinga av naturressursane som skaper
> problema. Det det same om ein er på Jæren, Jylland, i
> Schleswig-Holstein, i Flandern, Normandie, Galicia, på Azorane, eller på
> pampasen i Argentina.
Det er en alternativ teori ute og går, som sier at BSE og vCJD ikke
skyldes infisert dyrefôr og infisert kjøtt, men mangan og
sprøytemidler. Det er i så fall fremdeles industrijordbruket som har
hovedskylda, men mekanismen er en ganske annen.
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4095057,00.html
Mad cows, Bretons and manganese
The French cases of BSE may not have been spread from Britain
Special report: the BSE crisis
George Monbiot
Thursday November 23, 2000
The Guardian
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 we continued sending it to the third world
until 1996). In most other EU countries cases have already peaked and
declined, as expected.
But in France, the number of infected animals has doubled in the last
year. It is impossible to see how this pattern could result from the
export of British bone meal.
The simple fact is that 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 had an important
role to play. Yet this explanation alone fails to account for the huge
numbers of cattle in Britain which 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, nvCJD, published
three weeks ago, failed to find any link with the consumption of
infected beef.
You might have imagined that when its theory isn't working, a
government would wish to test the alternatives. But the British
administration has, so far, sought only to attack a hypothesis which
does appear to fit the facts. Since 1988, a Somerset farmer called
Mark Purdey has been arguing that scientists have overlooked the root
causes of BSE. Self-taught and self- financed, he has mastered 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 ultra-
violet 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 the prion normally binds to. This means
that the protein becomes distorted and loses its function.
BSE arose in British herds during the 1980s, Mark 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 the country'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 in Britain one, in Kent,
is in the middle of a fruit and hop growing area where huge quantities
of both 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 sewage 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,
Colorado, 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 this year. They found that when copper was
substituted by manganese in prion proteins, the prions adopted
precisely the distinguishing features which 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
burnt down. The Ministry of Agriculture, which for 50 years has
enjoyed 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 Somerset dairy farmer could
be about to overturn the entire body of scientific research on the
biggest public health scandal of modern times.
Guardian Unlimited ©
Guardian Newspapers
Limited 2000
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