From: hengist@home.com
> By REUTERS
> Filed at 9:10 a.m. ET
>
> SOMERSET, England (Reuters) - Mark Purdey still eats beef, even
> "junk" in pies and hamburgers, and he has no fear that he or his
> wife or six children will be struck down by the deadly human form
> of mad cow disease.
>
> "It's an absolute myth," the 48-year-old organic farmer says,
> banging his fist on a large wooden table to underline his argument
> that much of the accepted logic on bovine spongiform encephalopathy,
> or BSE, is wrong.
>
> His story unfolds -- a 16-year campaign to explore the effect of
> organophosphates, the chemicals he believes are behind the spread
> of the brain-wasting disease in cattle and in people.
>
> Purdey says we should distance ourselves from "the men in bow-ties"
> who have what he calls a monopoly on thought.
>
> Forget the role of tainted animal feed in spreading BSE among cattle
> or infected meat in passing the disease to humans as new variant
> Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD).
>
> Look instead at the use of systemic organophosphates, derived from
> military nerve gas, which the UK agriculture ministry told farmers
> to pour along the spine of their cattle in the early 1980s to kill
> a parasite called the warble fly.
>
> And those used in sprays used in Britain's countryside.
>
> "I have been hammering the establishment theory, the so-called meat-
> and-bone meal theory, since 1988 or 1989. Even then I had identified
> that meat and bone meal had been sold all over the world,
> particularly the Middle East," he says.
>
> "If you're blaming this stuff and you're sending it all over the
> world, why on earth aren't you getting more BSE?"
>
> He agrees that other scientists would argue it has yet to appear
> because of the long incubation period of disease, believed to be
> caused by a mutated prion protein in the brain.
>
> But Purdey argues there is little logic in the theory.
>
> He also disputes the argument that BSE is passed to humans via
> infected beef.
>
> "If it was to do with eating beef we'd have lots of cases in towns,
> where most burger bars are, but 60 percent of cases are in rural
> areas," he said.
>
> "Most victims live by fields, where crops are sprayed."
>
> SELF-TAUGHT SCIENTIST
>
> A self-taught scientist, Purdey says he acted first on "intuition,"
> refusing to treat his 60 cows with the organophosphate, called
> phosmet, and going on to win a court battle with the agriculture
> ministry to make his point.
>
> When BSE was first detected in a British herd in 1986, he immediately
> thought phosmet was the problem -- a theory which after years of
> unpaid research has now won respect from senior scientists, public
> figures and politicians.
>
> ``Like most things it was instinct. Being a farmer, I was horrified
> when I was approached by a ministry official to treat a cow for
> warble fly by pouring this chemical along the spinal cord and the
> base of the head,'' he said.
>
> "It was an oil designed to seep through the skin and to change the
> entire internal environment of the cow into a poisonous medium to
> kill off the parasites."
>
> Purdey began to trawl through books and do field research.
>
> He looked at the clusters of BSE in Britain, clusters of deer and
> elk in the United States with a similar illness called chronic
> wasting disease, and villages where many people were dying of the
> more common Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
>
> "I went on the road," he said, describing trips to the United States,
> Slovakia, Calabria in Italy and Iceland.
>
> "To me it was clearly something in the environment that was igniting
> these illnesses. But what was this factor?"
>
> He found one common factor -- high levels of manganese, a metal given
> to cattle in high doses via the organophosphate.
>
> "What I found in the environment was supported by the laboratory,"
> he said, describing tests by David Brown, a neurobiologist at
> Cambridge University.
>
> Purdey explains the prion would normally bond with copper and carry
> it around the brain to destroy free radicals. But if lacking copper,
> the prion bonds with another metal -- manganese, which stops the
> prion from folding properly.
>
> He did soil analysis on the areas near clusters of vCJD in Britain
> and found high levels of manganese from crop spraying. He concluded
> the doses of manganese intensifies the traditional illness, giving
> vCJD the potency to kill younger people.
>
> FUNDING REQUIRED
>
> Now all he wants is funding for more research -- something that
> Agriculture Minister Nick Brown says may be ready in May after a
> scientist has reviewed all work into the origins of BSE.
>
> "In the BSE inquiry there is a caveat that it is not clear whether
> organophosphates could have been a contributory factor...it leaves
> the door open on organophosphates," Brown told Reuters.
>
> But Purdey is worried that the funding may never come.
>
> "No one's prepared to admit it because it would involve massive
> compensation," he said. "By keeping the causal agent as something
> mystified, no one's to blame."
>
> Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company