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farm. This place is or-ganic. Do you know how BSE is supposed to have
started?
I read something in Jim s notes about animal feed.
Vincent nodded. MAFF that s the Ministry of Agriculture relaxed their rules
in the 1980s, allowing the rendering industry to take a few shortcuts. Don t
ask me why it happened or who was responsible, but it happened. They removed
two processes, saving time and money. One was a solvent extraction, the other
a steam-heat treatment. You see, the rendering industry was rendering down
sheep and cows to feed to other cows. Bits of meat and bone were going into
the feed cake.
Right. Reeve buttoned up his jacket, still damp from a dash through the rain
to catch the train. The evening was growing chilly.
Because those two processes had been removed, prions got into the feed cake.
Prion protein is sometimes called PrP.
I saw it in the notes, I think.
It causes scrapie in sheep. Vincent raised a finger. Remember, this is the
accepted story I m giving you. So the feed cake was infected, and the cows
were being given the bovine form of sheep scrapie, which is BSE. He paused,
then smiled. You re wondering what all this has to do with Spanish cook-ing
oil.
Reeve nodded.
Vincent started to walk, following the wall along the back of the milking
shed. Well, the Spanish blamed contaminated cooking oil and left it at that.
Only, some of the victims had never touched the oil.
And some of the cows who hadn t eaten the infected feed still caught BSE?
Vincent shook his head. Oh, no, the point is this: some farms organic
farms who had used the so-called infected feed didn t catch the disease at
all.
Hang on a second&
I know what you re thinking. But organic farms are allowed to buy in twenty
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percent conventional feed.
So you re saying BSE had nothing to do with feed cake, infected or
otherwise?
Vincent smiled without humor. Why use the past tense? BSE is still with us.
The infected feed cake was banned on the eighteenth of July 1988. He
pointed into the distance. I can show you calves less than six months old who
have BSE. Vets from MAFF call them BABs: Born After the Ban. There ve been
more than ten thousand of them. To date, nearly a hundred and fifty thousand
cows have died in the UK from BSE.
They had come back to the farmyard. Vincent opened the Subaru. Get in, he
said. Reeve got in. Vincent kept telling his story as he drove.
I mentioned ME a little while back. When it first came to be noticed, it was
supposed to have its roots in everyday stress. They called it Yuppie Flu. It
isn t called that nowadays. Now we call it Farmers Flu. That s because so
many farmers show symptoms. There s a man used to be a farmer, now he s more
of a campaigner, though he still tries to farm when they let him who s trying
to discover why there s an increase in the occurrence of neurological diseases
like ME, Alzheimer s, and Parkinson s.
What do you mean, when they let him ?
He s been threatened, Vincent said simply. People helping him have died.
Car crashes, unexplained deaths, accidents& He turned to Reeve. Only four or
five, you understand. Not yet an epidemic.
They were winding down country lanes barely the width of two cars. The sun had
gone down.
Vincent put the heater on. It may just be coincidence, he said, that BSE
started to appear around the same time that MAFF was telling farmers to
protect against warble fly in their cattle by rubbing on an organophosphorus
treatment. What some of us would like to know is whether OPs can cause prions
to mutate.
So these OP chemicals are to blame?
Nobody knows. It sometimes seems to me hardly anybody wants to know. I mean,
imagine the embarrassment if it turned out a government directive had started
the whole thing off. Imagine the claims for compensation that would be put in
by the farmers suffering from OP poisoning. Imagine the cost to the
agrichemical industry if they had to withdraw products, carry out expensive
tests& maybe even pay compensation. We re talking about a worldwide industry.
The whole farming world is hooked on pesticides of one kind or another. And on
the other side of the coin, if pesticides had to be withdrawn, and new ones
created and tested, there d be a gap of years and in those years yields would
decrease, pests would multiply, farms would go out of business, the cost of
every foodstuff in the supermarket would rocket. You can see where that would
lead: economic disaster. He looked at Reeve again. Maybe they re right to
try and stop us. What are a few lives when measured against an economic
disaster of those proportions?
Reeve shivered, digging deeper into his coat. He felt exhausted, lack of sleep
and jet lag hitting him hard. Who s trying to stop you?
Could be any or all of them.
CWC?
Co-World Chemicals has a lot to lose. Its worldwide market share is worth
billions of dollars annually. They ve also got a very persuasive lobby which
keeps the majority of farmers and governments on their side. Sweetened, as you
might say.
Reeve nodded, getting his meaning. So there s a cover-up going on.
To my mind undoubtedly, but then I would say that. I was suddenly fired from
my job, a job I thought I was good at. When I began to be persuaded that the
feed-cake explanation just wasn t on, I spoke twice about it in public, sent
out a single press release and next thing I knew my job was being phased
out.
I thought the National Farmers Union was supposed to be on the side of
farmers.
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It is on the side of farmers or at least, it s on the side of the majority of
them, the ones with their heads in the sand.
Where are we going?
We re nearly there.
Reeve had half-thought he was going to be returned to the railroad station,
meeting over. But, if anything, the landscape had grown less populous. They
turned up a track and arrived at a high mesh gate topped with razor wire. A
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