Were the prions responsible for Mad Cow disease created by a reaction to agricultural pesticides?

Back in the early eighties, when acid rain was destroying all life in certain lakes, and even killing Pine trees, a 'scientific debate' took place about the 'theory' that chemical pollution in the atmosphere was responsible for the phenomena. (The pine is an acid loving tree, preferring acidic soils, but the acid rain was just to acidic even for a pine.) Acid lakes, the pseudo-science position stated, was simply a natural phenomena, and part of a natural cycle of some kind or another. Expensive scrubber technology was an unneccesary burden on industry since they weren't responsible for releasing the carbon compounds in the atmosphere that caused acid rain. Ronald Reagan jumped onto the band wagon, blaming acidic lakes on migrating ducks and geese. These birds, he insisted, made pit stops at lakes in large numbers, urinated, and just destroyed the lake. Trees were also responsible for polluting the planet, he insisted, thus being responsible for the very acid rain that killed them. All this, we were told as the 'scientific debate' gained steam, was part of 'the natural cycle'. Governments refused to address the problem on the grounds that 'science was uncertain' and 'more research needed to be done.' The fact that some psuedo-science was released proved enough to justify stalling tactics, on the grounds that 'many decades were needed to resolve the obvious scientific controversy surrounding the acid rain phenomena, and it would be premature to impose expensive scrubber technologies on industries before science got its act together, which it hasn't, as you can tell by the opposing theories about acid rain in the scientific community.' It was obvious then, that all that is required to stifle a debate, and all that is required to ignore scientific evidence, when the evidence goes against you (and against powerful vested interests) is a dash of psuedo-science, a few 'mavericks' to cause the 'debate' to drag on for years and even decades, while everyone is encouraged to wait until 'science produces some real results'. Psuedo-science then performs a vitally important function when vested interests and large sums of money and political influence are involved, in that it allows the myth to propagate that 'science is uncertain' and the 'results are not yet in' and that 'scientists still can't agree.'

Cattle also represent a powerful vested interest in our society, and so the science surrounding Mad Cow disease seems to be the next to get the 'scientific debate' treatment, as once again, the scientific evidence goes against powerful vested interests, rather than in their favor, which would be more convenient. Livestock are the prop that maintains the enormous production of modern agriculture. Livestock, like pigs eat eighty per cent of the corn produced, ten per cent goes into industrial processes and another ten per cent is actually consumed by humans. Livestock around the world are the major consumers of all grains produced, and without them, the world would be swamped with food. Already such huge surpluses are produced, even through farm animals are such large consumers, that subsidies and protectionist regimes are the norm in countries around the world. Food is often destroyed, to avoid glutting the market and driving down commodity prices even further, with cheese for example, being plowed into land fills or dumped into the oceans. Commodity prices are so low that they are just barely above or even below the cost of production, and still the world continues to produce more food (while human beings starve, and the latest famine disasters are once again underfunded, as they always are, but this distortion of pure free market principles - where even simple human life has become a commodity which must be purchased or it will be 'repossessed' (read 'death' = 'no money'), well this is a separate moral issue.) It is typical that a farmer will get a fraction of the value of a loaf of bread as compensation. This is also true of the cattle industry. While the agricultural sector is measured in tens of billions per year, the processed cow sector is measured in hundreds of billions, and as the years go by, in trillions of accumulated cash flow - trillions piling upon trillions of dollars of economic activity accumulating over the years and decades in the processed cow sector. So therefore measuring the value of the cow based on simply the ranch price of that cow underestimates the true value of the animal, and the true power of the vested interests involved in the marketing and servicing of the processed cow. The animal is worth trillions over time.

For this reason it is neccesary to regard with skepticism the newly emerging 'psuedo-science' which purports to exonerate the trillion dollar processed cow, and blames Mad Cow disease on something else. The powerful vested interests, much like those on the firing line for acid rain, are not likely to be pleased to have scientific results which implicate, rather than exonerate, the cow, and thus it is not surprising that 'new scientific evidence' is out and circulating, which, not surprisingly, takes the cow off the hook and assigns blame somewhere else for what has, they would suggest, erroneously been called 'Mad Cow disease' when actually the blame belongs elsewhere. That one of the leading proponents and one of the leading researchers promoting this new theory which restores the strerling reputation of the cow is, in addition to being a scientific researcher, also a cow farmer, is not exactly encouraging if one is concerned about an agenda driving the results. A cow farmer is hardly an impartial investigator, and that a cow farmer's research would exonerate the cow and place the blame elsewhere is also suspect, in that a cow farmer, or the entire cow sector, is hardly without a vested interests in finding 'scientific evidence' that there is no reason to blame a cow for Mad Cow disease, which now, no doubt, should be a disease with a new name, since it has nothing to do with cows per se.

ABC news featured a story on this emerging attempt to undermine the science done on Mad Cow and vCJD, and this sort of story is also beginning to surface in other places around the internet, often under titles that suggest that new evidence and research proves the innocence of the cow. Having seen it all before, as I described above, I am not too surprised, and expect much political hay to be made off this 'new science', as it was before, even though, as before, the majority view point of the scientists involved is against the controverial 'research' and for good reason, too, it turns out.

ABC news addresses this emerging issue in a story titled 'Could the environment trigger Mad Cow disease? Controversial research says metals, not infectious beef, may be involved.'

"What if much of the science to date, focusing on contaminated meat, has been overly simplistic or even dead wrong? The immediate implication would be that we would have to rethink everything already done to fight the disease, both in Britain where it began, in Europe, where it has spread, and in other nations, including the United States, where concerns are mounting about its potential to be unleashed ... But, of course, this prevention strategy presumed the prevailing scientific perspective on mad cow disease and its human form, variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease or vCJD, is correct."

The rest of the story will be dedicated to debunking the theory that beef is exonerated and something else is to be blamed instead. The term 'mad cow' will appear in the story in quotes (similar to describing 'so called "Mad Cow" disease.) The article then quotes a biochemist named David Brown, who insists that there is no 'conclusive proof' that mad cow caused vCJD. The phrase 'conclusive proof' is politically important, since it is required to have dissident science to support any future claims that 'the debate rages on' and thus there is not yet 'conclusive proof'. Actually there never is 'conclusive proof' in science, things being based on probabilities, which has always served us well, until powerful vested interests are challenged by the results, in which case we suddenly require 'conclusive proof'.

According to experiments he performed Manganese can cause symptoms similar to those of Mad Cow disease. "For example, workers who have been exposed to high industrial doses of manganese have suffered tremors and muscular rigidity, hallucinations, and involuntary laughing and crying. Biochemical analysis of central nervous system tissue in humans poisoned by manganese shows that the metal can cause brain cells to die." Brown denies that the prions involved in mad cow and vCJD are infectious. He insists rather that Maganese can change make prions abnormal, especially where a deficiency of copper is present. In this situation then it would not be neccesary for the prions to be contagious in order to explain the spread of both Mad Cow and vCJD. The two phenomena are unrelated.

The ABC article then features Mike Purdey, the cattle farmer turned amateur scientist, who has also picked up the Manganese angle. Purdey is an organic farmer, who objects to the use of agricultural chemicals, and fought off demands by the British government that he spray his cattle with a phosphate pesticide in 1984 to kill warble fly larvae and eggs. The pesticide is a constituent of nerve gas. Purdey claims to have noticed that Mad Cow disease first erupted on farms where the nerve agent was used. He also notes that no organically raised cattle have developed Mad Cow disease. He claims to have found high levels of manganese in soils where Mad Cow disease existed.

"All his digging around has led to a highly detailed theory for mad cow disease: In short: The high doses of organophosphates that were poured on the cows' spines and poisoned the bodies decreased the amount of copper in cells. The feed given to animals in the '80s contained high amounts of manganese, some of it derived from chicken manure of chickens fed high doses of manganese to strengthen egg shells. Supplemental powders and mineral licks with manganese were sometimes added to feed troughs. The depletion of copper and the high manganese changes normal prions to abnormal, thus setting the stage for disease."

Other scientists have referred to this theory as 'nonsense', on the grounds that "the theory that organophosphates are involved in mad cow disease fails to account for the evidence that the disease can be experimentally transmitted." In otherwords, it has been established, experimentally, that the prion is in fact infectious, and that it can move from cattle tissue to human tissue, which is the important fact. Purdey attempts to debunk this evidence by insisting that the prions are only infectious under experimental conditions, but could not be infectious when beef products are consumed. He attempts to insist that beef under experimental lab conditions is toxic because scientists have done something to it that changes 'the arrangement of metals' thus causing new twisted prions to form. The prions themselves, he wants to insist are not thus contagious in and of themselves. The counter scientific arguement is that many countries are Mad Cow free in spite of the fact that they use phosphate chemicals in agriculture, and thus we must consider how mad cow and VCJD in humans are clusted together. Purdey, attempts to respond that they must be using chemicals differently in those countries.

The ABC story concludes by suggesting that 'more research is neccesary' and also points out how the British house of commons is developing an interest in the new theory, which doesn't surprise me, since this is what everyone would be looking for.

The bio-chemist who first suggested a link between Mad Cow and agricultural chemicals stated that he "also believes that ignoring the possibility that environmental factors trigger both animal and human diseases could prevent action from being taken to clean up toxic effects that may be at the root of the problem. "We obviously need much broader research in this entire area," he said."

This is a very good point. For while by itself, the chemical connection does not adequately explain the spread of Mad Cow disease, it could very well be the case that agricultural chemicals were in fact the source of the original infectious agent. The attempts of the cow farmer above to completely exonerate the cow is understandable, and it would also not be surprising to find the really big money international multi-trillion dollar processed cow industry jumping onto the band wagon. However this is bad science, psuedo-science, for a number of reasons. First, it has been experimentally demonstrated that the prions are infectious agents. Attempts to debunk this research by suggestings that 'scientists changed the metals in the experiment' is a desperate arguement, a form of denial, speculative and not supported by the facts. As well, work is underway in Colorado to develope a Mad Deer test by checking the tonsils of deer, and other work is underway on developing a blood test for vCJD and Mad Cow disease, something badly needed. The prions are capable of circulating through the blood stream, showing up in tonsils then, or such research is pointless. The prions can also persist in the environment, and can only be destroyed by high temperature burning. This, and the evidence of the infectious nature of the prions, and the ongoing research to detect evidence for the presence of the agents in both the blood stream and the tonsils of infected animals, suggest that consumption of the prions is indeed a route of transmission.

However, this is not to suggest that all the research into a chemical connection with Mad Cow disease and vCJD is worthless. This only becomes 'psuedo-science' when the terms of the debate become a drive to exonerate the trillion dollar cow. This line of research is valid if the question is 'what was the original source of the prions that cause Mad Cow disease.' This angle is worthy of research, and so far their is some evidence to suggest that agricultural chemicals may have been responsible for first creating the infectious agent. This, of course, will challenge the multi-billion dollar chemical industry, who no doubt will want to find some science to suggest that it just isn't so. However, the question of where Mad Cow prions might have originated is separate from a discussion of the infectious nature of prions, and the cow as a transmission route for the agent. Checmical agents may have originally created the prions, but it is a stretch, given the accumulated (and still building) body of evidence that indicates that the prions, once created, are in fact infectious agents. This line of research becomes psuedo-science when manipulated by politicians, and when the terms of the debate are distorted, actually existing scientific evidence is desperately debunked, and all in an obvious attempt to completely exonerate the cow, and maybe blame the chemical industry wholly for Mad Cow and vCJD. I just point all this out, because I take this rash of new stories appearing on the internet, which attempt to shift the blame completely, debunk scientific evidence, and exonerate the cow, all of it is likely a foretaste of what is to come, and how the debate is likely to take shape, if it should be the case that the trillion dollar cow industry takes a knock on the chin, and thus desperately needs some counter science of their own, or at the very least needs to spread the idea that 'science is unsure' and it 'is to soon to be sure' and so on and so on, as we have seen so many times before when powerful vested interests find scientific data not to their liking, and thus starting funding scientific research of their own, with an obvious agenda in mind. as in the case of acid rain, and other controveries, the evidence was not in favor of the industry, but rather suggested that the uncomfortable truth was in fact the truth, and all this psuedo-science did was ignore the actual evidence, in favor of spreading unfounded theories, debunking existing data, and all this in order to facilitate the myth that 'science is unsure' and 'we just don't know' and 'action is premature.' The best way to resist such obvious attempts to undermine the facts, is to familiarize oneself with the facts, and being armed with some clear knowledge, one can then respond sensibly to any attempts to distort and twist the terms of reference of the debate, and all this because powerful interests don't like the way the truth is coming out. In the case of the emerging 'psuedo-science' counter attack by the cow industry, the important fact to keep in mind here is that the discussion of the original source of Mad Cow infection (agricultural chemicals) is entirely separate from the discussion of the infectious nature of these prions once they have come into existence. Any attempt to obfusticate and cloud the issue should be recognized immediately for what it is, an attempt to change the terms of the debate by misusing a legitimate area of research, worth pursuing (although the chemical industry might not like it).

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