Optimism, finger-crossing and inactivity is unacceptable for a disease such as this.Stephen DeallerThe writer is consultant in medical microbiology at Burnley General Hospital.. The Australian Rugby League is going back to court today to seek injunctions to stop Maurice Lindsay and 311 Super League-aligned players setting up their own competition. Good markets and low margins have led to excellent food in the UK that is relatively cheap. The problem is that if something goes wrong then a whole industry collapses and a whole country is put at risk.BSE should now be considered a threat to public health and should be handled by the Department of Health.
It has done this by bringing in good methods and spreading them throughout the agricultural world Food is spread from one part of the UK to another. The repeated tightening of the restrictions on beef manufacture has made the previous restrictions clearly inadequate.The Ministry of Agriculture has produced a huge increase in the amount of food grown in the UK. At that time, we were eating 250,000 livers from infected cattle.Seac’s original decisions were optimistic but reasonable They have turned out to be wrong or ill-informed. We now find that large numbers of cattle, which are the offspring of infected cattle, go on to develop BSE.Originally, Seac felt that BSE-infected cattle would not transmit their infection to humans. This was because tissues injected into mice produced no ill-effect in the mice.
Yet a single human meal of such a tissue could contain 30,000 infective units (where one unit is enough for a cow to infect another cow). In other words, it is impossible from these experiments to prove that there is not enough present in a single meal to infect a human.The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens implicitly recognised the uncertainty in 1994. It stated that if certain tissues (which we were still eating) were considered as being possibly from a cow that was infected with BSE, then they should not be handled without gloves, should be acted on in a fume cabinet, and the person dealing with them should probably wear a face mask. But at the moment we do not know whether this optimistic belief is, in fact, soundly based.
Likewise, Seac felt that BSE would not be passed from cow to calf during pregnancy. That was a very risky position to take, given the dangers involved if the gloomiest predictions prove correct. The stance taken by the authorities is even more worrying in retrospect since we now know that many of their expectations have proved to be wrong.
As a result of a policy that was over-optimistic, the public in now danger. Originally, the Government’s advisers – the spongiform encephalopathy advisory committee (Seac) – decided that BSE was probably passed on only in feed and that when the infectivity of the feed stopped in 1988, so would the BSE epidemic. The story of BSE in Britain is of the authorities making reasonable, but hopeful decisions They have erred on the side of optimism. This suggests that some defence mechanism operates in the gut of healthy beings. So while we must consider a risk, however minute, from the intake of prions through beef consumption, the greater risk must come from exposing ourselves in early life – perhaps in the womb – to significant doses of chemicals that can corrupt this prion protein.I believe it was the exposure of our cattle population, farmers and animal workers to these chemicals in the 1980s that switched on the epidemic of this disease. This could be the true cause of the BSE debacle.Mark PurdeyThe author is an organic dairy farmer in Somerset and a BSE researcher.. We can’t simply blame it on feed .Infectious though this prion agent is, the feeding of massive doses of these prions to misfortunate laboratory animals rarely passes the disease on.
An epidemic can then erupt.This line of thinking should make us look again at conventional explanations for BSE. (Maff’s chief vet in 1912 reports “Scrapie in Oxon!”)But a specific environmental trigger may mean that the folding process of the protein becomes artificially corrupted in large numbers of beings, so that the abnormal protein starts accumulating like a cluster bomb in the brain. I warned officials that this chemical could permanently damage proteins inside the central nervous system of both the treated cows and the farmers carrying out the treatment. It is worth remembering that there has been no case of BSE in home-reared cattle on organic farms.I endorse US scientific opinion that BSE and similar diseases are caused by the presence of a misfolded version of a specific protein called prion protein, found inside the brain of all mammals. The protein can become corrupted due to a rare inherited genetic fault; this accounts for low background incidence rates of all these diseases (CJD, scrapie, BSE) that have run for light years. The whole purpose was to kill off the warble grub that could be found even inside the central nervous system itself.Being an organic farmer, I won a High Court action in 1984 to debar the Ministry of Agriculture from treating my cows with this pesticide. It contains organo-phosporate – a chemical also found in military nerve gas used in Iraq.