THE GREAT BSE SCAM
By the late Dr Kitty Little MA BSc PhD
18 September 1998

On 1st September 1978 a Statutory Instrument that had been issued by the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food came into operation : (Warble Fly (England and Wales) Order 1978.- S.I. 1978 No. -1197).
For the stated purpose of eliminating Warble Fly, this required all cattle to have their backs and heads treated with a powerful organophosphate nerve poison.

Other countries in Europe used the same organophosphate nerve poison to eliminate the warble fly, but under different conditions. For every poison there is a threshold level below which symptoms do not develop, and with the exception of Switzerland and Britain the doses were kept below the threshold level. Switzerland and Britain used oil to increase absorption of the poison, and in Switzerland a dozen or so animals developed the symptoms of BSE. The oil had raised the absorption dose to just above the threshold. But in Britain a dose four times the recommended dose had been used, with the result that large numbers of cattle developed BSE.

When he read a description of the symptoms of BSE, a military intelligence officer told me that they were identical with the symptoms produced by military nerve gases in animal trials. He assumed correctly - that I would be interested, since he knew that for the last 40 years, the greater part of my work has been on topics where research results have been falsified.

The main effect of the organophosphate (OP) nerve poisons is to deactivate acetylcholine esterase. The function of this enzyme is to control the levels of acetylcholine in the brain. When it is deactivated, the levels of acetylcholine can rise to several hundred times normal. The changes in the brain giving rise to BSE symptoms do not occur until the acetylcholine levels are well over 100 times normal. There is a simple blood test for acetylcholine, and if this had been done during active phases of the BSE syndrome it could readily have been shown whether the overdose given during the warblefly treatment had been the cause of the BSE. This should have been the first thing the Ministry of Agriculture considered, but they didn’t. It seems that the scaremongers were already in control.

A second effect of these nerve poisons is to modify the structure of certain proteins, known as prion proteins. Mark Purdey gave clear evidence about this to the BSE Inquiry in March. This change happens at much lower doses than those needed to cause BSE symptoms. And so the scaremongers used a confidence trick that anyone who has done ‘O’-level biology should have been able to spot. They pretended that those modified proteins were an infective agent.

An essential property of any infective agent, whether bacteria, virus or mycoplasma, is that it should be able to reproduce itself. Those prion proteins do not reproduce themselves. They are formed by cells and modified by toxic agents, and that is all. Again, if there is an infection, such as foot and mouth disease, it spreads from one animal to another. BSE didn’t. The farmers, the victims of all this, are fully aware of the actions of infectious agents in herds of cattle, and that BSE did not follow that pattern. They are not to give evidence to the BSE Inquiry. Also, if the “new variant CJD” was due to eating beef containing an infective agent, there ought to be many more cases in the United Kingdom than elsewhere. In fact, the incidence is lower in the United Kingdom than in many other countries.

If the pretence that BSE is an infection that could be transmitted to humans was to be kept up, there was a need to provide something that could be interpreted as “transmissible”.
A start was made by referring to “TSEs” - “transmissible spongiform encephalopathies” - to get people used to the idea. Again a confidence trick was being employed, that anyone with an elementary knowledge of biology could spot.

It is well known that for blood transfusions or tissue transplants the tissue of donor and recipient have to be compatible, otherwise there is a “foreign body” reaction. In the experiments that have been done to make the idea of TSEs apparently plausible, brain tissue has been transplanted from one animal to another and from one species to another. The expected “foreign body” reactions have been described as transmission of infection.
In March, Professors Ebringer and Pirt explained to the BSE Inquiry about immune and autoimmune reactions, but the scaremongers have ignored their evidence.

Professor Southwood’s evidence to the Inquiry was revealing. In 1988 there was no evidence of a BSE-like illness in people, but he had been told “by the Central Veterinary Laboratory” that it was an infection, so just in case it might spread to humans his Committee recommended that over 2 million healthy cattle should be killed and their carcasses destroyed. (The new abattoirs needed for this were already in place). He twice appealed to doctors to try to find some cases among their patients.

As a result of the scaremongers’ disinformation campaign we have had a variety of harmful edicts banning beef-on-the-bone, doubts about blood for blood transfusions, and dozens of regulations about the surviving cattle, that are harmful and very costly for farmers, and amount to cruelty to the animals. And now there is the suggestion that all the sheep in the country should be killed off. The foundations for this latest confidence trick were also laid in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Sheep dipping became compulsory: the agents recommended by the Ministry of Agriculture being organophosphate poisons. The “protective clothing” recommended to farmers let the poison straight through. The Health and Safety Executive had prepared a Guidance Note MS 17, that was revised in February 1986, “Health Surveillance of Workers Exposed to Organophosphates and Carbamate Pesticides”. Its distribution was blocked. The symptoms described for OP poisoning are the same as those described for some of the “New Variant CJD” victims.

Hundreds of farmers were affected by the OPs in the dip, and more have died of their effects - over 200 so far - than there have been cases of the “New Variant CJD”.
Paragraph 32 in the blocked Health and Safety Guidance Note says:

32. OP poisoning is a notifiable disease under the Factories Act 1961 and also a prescribed disease under the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act 1965. An HSE agricultural inspector must be informed when an agricultural worker or a self-employed person is suspected of suffering from OP poisoning caused by a substance specified in the Poisonous Substances in Agriculture Regulations 1984”.
The Ministry of Agriculture has consistently denied that any of the many cases of OP poisoning among farmers were OP poisoning.

It is only reasonable to expect that many of the sheep that were dipped will have the modified prion protein caused by the OP poisons to which they were exposed, and this would give the scaremongers the excuse for having all our sheep killed, and thus eliminate livestock farming.

We have now arrived at a situation where the BSE “infection” is supposed to have been derived from scrapie in sheep, while the present suggestion is that sheep will get a TSE from the BSE “infection”.

So what about scrapie? It is a very rare condition. One might expect to find about 2 cases a year in the whole of the North West, or 5 or 6 cases in the South West. In Australia and New Zealand there is no scrapie among the same breeds of sheep. It has been known for centuries not to be infectious. (Even if it were infectious there are far too few cases to have infected hundreds of cattle).

Since the “scrapie causes BSE” myth was launched there have been strenuous efforts to find some infectious agent for scrapie, with no success. All the evidence points to it being a toxic reaction from some mould or fungus in the ground. In that connection it is interesting that the vet David Bee gave evidence to the BSE Inquiry in March concerning cattle that, a short time before the BSE outbreak, had developed BSE-like symptoms as a result of eating mouldy feeding stuff.

There remain the “New Variant CJD” cases that have been reported. Experiments reported by Professor John Collinge have shown that it is similar to BSE and different from other types of CJD. This is very strong evidence that these cases are really cases of OP poisoning. Ordinary CJD cases come in a variety of forms and are also non-infectious, which must lead to a suspicion that some of the cases are the result of a reaction to a toxin. The cases that were the subject of a recent High Court action, where the source had been an apparently contaminated growth hormone preparation, are examples of an autoimmune reaction.

The scaremongers are providing more and more lurid headlines: -“Mass testing for BSE - breakthrough will show if millions have killer disease”, “The making of a modem plague”, and so on. But what are the facts?
Since Professor Southwood made his plea to the medical profession 27 alleged cases have been reported in 11 years. They are meant to have “caught the disease” by eating beef, but at least one, and probably three or more of the victims have been vegetarians.
A cluster of the cases occurred near an OP factory in Kent, when an accident resulted in some of the products being dispersed into its surroundings. One alleged case was a man who had never shown any CJD symptoms, and had died of something completely irrelevant. It had been “diagnosed” at post mortem.

Most people are now exposed to OPs. They are in insect sprays, pesticides, on wheat (and therefore in bread), on cereals, fruit and vegetables that have been sprayed with pesticides, and so on. They are not in beef or mutton (lamb), so that those are the safest foods to eat if one is afraid of getting the “new variant CJD”.

As well as high doses of OPs that are above the threshold level for the toxic reaction leading to BSE and the debilitating symptoms in farmers, Gulf War veterans who were sprayed with the OP nerve gas, and the “new variant CJD” cases, there is a considerably lower threshold for the production of modified prion proteins. The confidence tricksters are hoping that the change due to all the other causes of exposure to OPs will have occurred in a sufficient number of people for them to be able to suggest that since a large number of people have caught the “infection” in due course all of them and probably many more will develop “New Variant CJD”. If a sufficient number of people fall for that scam, the way will be wide open for the scaremongers to arrange for the total destruction of our livestock industry. That appears to have been the object of the exercise.
Fish, eggs and milk have also been under attack, so that we would be deprived of our indigenously produced proteins - and our merchant navy is now virtually non-existent.

There remains the question: what should be done about it? We have had over 2 million healthy cattle killed, unnecessarily. There is a threat that large numbers of healthy sheep might be killed, also unnecessarily. Having got away with so much, the scaremongers in what might be called the “BSE Industry” are coming out with more and more outrageous suggestions, while the Ministry of Agriculture is forking out millions of pounds to feed that hungry “cuckoo in the nest”.

The BSE Inquiry will not be over till next June, and even then its report will be about who has done what, and not the consequences of their actions. There is every reason to think that at least some of the actions of the scaremongers and “BSE industry” are criminal, but a criminal investigation also takes time, and by then these people could have done totally irreparable damage to the country. The sequence of events very strongly suggests that that has been their intention.

I would suggest that the Government should take immediate action to:

1. Withdraw all funds going to the scaremongers and the “BSE Industry

2. Cease to spend anything implementing niggling and petty laws that harm people. (We have been a Christian nation for almost two millennia, and Christ’s teaching on such laws was unambiguous. They should be ignored).

3. Use the money released from those sources to properly compensate farmers, so that they can build up our livestock industry again.

4. Immediately repeal all Orders etc, from and including that of 14 June 1988 onwards, that seem to have been designed for the purpose of harassing farmers, animals, butchers and others. Reimburse people who have been fined or had their businesses harmed by those unjustifiable Orders, etc.

5. Have the Health and Safety Guidance Note MS17 circulated to all farmers, and to all people handling organophosphate preparations. (Including Prince Philip, who got a brush-off from the Ministry of Agriculture over the deaths of birds and animals as a result of crop-spraying on the Sandringham estate, the Ministry being at fault).

Posted 20th March 2008 Go to top

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