Part 2: Mark Purdey.
The late organic dairy farmer Mark Purdey was tall, unkempt, and played the saxophone to his cows.
Purdey was a man with a problem with authority. He first came into the news in 1984 when he successfully quashed the UK government's compulsory warble fly eradication scheme in the high courts, thus exempting his farming business from treating his organic cattle with high doses of organophosphate insecticides.
Organophosphate insecticides are, incidentally, a by-product of Nazi research into nerve gas. They are an anathema to organic farmers.
Purdey came up with a hypothesis that “mad cow disease” (BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy) was due to a mineral imbalance between copper and manganese. This imbalance was primarily due to the unnatural diet which was then being fed to livestock, a diet which included chicken manure and ground up animal carcases. Phosmet – an organophosphate insecticide – acted as a “force multiplier” on this imbalance, with fatal consequences.
Purdey had first hand experience to back up his theory: cows bred on his Somerset farm did not contract BSE, but some cows that he had purchased from other farms did. Of course, this small sample did not prove the hypothesis. Much more research was needed for that, the sort of research that needed government funding.
If Purdey was right, there would have been an inexpensive solution to this debilitating, mysterious, and deadly disease. It would have saved farmers and the taxpayer millions, saved hundreds of human lives, and best of all, people won’t need to be scared any more.
The government funding for the research never came.
It does not look like the bulk of Purdey’s hypothesis has stood the test of time — or at least not yet. But could it be that the main reason that he didn’t manage to “sell” his idea was simply that it was not frightening enough?
A rather generous obituary of Mark Purdey can be found at http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/nov/21/guardianobituaries.bse
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