BSE and Blood

From the beginning of the BSE disaster to the present day the scientific community has insisted that there is "no evidence" that the "infective agent" of BSE is present in meat.
This has served to reassure the public that eating beef is perfectly safe, despite the comedy of errors which was the "Beef-on-the-Bone Ban"

The reason for this ban was said to be because of the presence of nervous tissue in bone and yet the muscles themselves, the very part of the animal which provides vital nutrients for man, are directly linked to the nervous system. In fact, unless that classical work "Gray's Anatomy" got anatomy completely wrong, nerve fibres are everywhere and extend from the centre of the body in the spinal cord to the skin itself. To suggest that nerve fibres and the "infective agent" within them are restricted to the Central Nervous System must be complete nonsense.

Additional problems for the science are found with the admission that the spleen, tonsils, appendix and even the lymph system could harbour reserves of the "infective agent". Lymph nodes are found at sites throughout the body and have been linked to the nervous system.
So why did the scientists single out bone for the ban?

The reasons given are that the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) advised that "infectivity" had been found in the dorsal root ganglia and possibly the bone marrow of cattle "infected experimentally" with BSE. Although the risk from bone marrow was apparently not assessed they used the same tests on blood, which had shown "infectivity" in the nervous tissues, "at every stage of the same experiments" and they all had negative results.

Why did they not test the bone marrow?
The bone marrow produces the blood and if there is a "highly infectious" agent in the bone marrow then this is likely to be passed directly to the blood.

Rachel Carson may have the answer in her book "Silent Spring".
"Benzene, a frequent constituent of insecticidal solvents, lodges in the marrow and remains deposited there for periods known to be as long as 20 months. Benzene itself has been recognised in medical literature for many years as a cause of leukaemia."
That book was published in the 1960s and yet SEAC did not test the bone marrow.

If benzene is the solvent for pesticides then it is likely that not only does the benzene lodge in the marrow for many months but it may take the pesticide there too. Perhaps that is why SEAC did not wish to look too closely at bone marrow and chose instead to ban bones from the food chain.

Clearly if the blood becomes "infected" then the entire animal, or human, will have that "infective agent" throughout the body and yet SEAC, the experts who advise Government, denied the dangers in meat.

So why the fears about blood?
We should be able to examine the scientific methods in detail but reports available may offer clues as to why this confusion has arisen.

The latest reports suggest that the Institute for Animal Health "proved" that sheep "can be infected with BSE by blood transfusion".
But if we examine the report in detail there are questions to be asked.

"Blood was taken from 19 infected sheep before the disease became apparent."
How did those sheep get BSE? To date the authorities proclaim that BSE has not been found in sheep outside of the laboratory.
This is particularly odd since from the outset science claimed that cattle "caught" BSE as the result of eating sheep which had scrapie. The suggestion being that BSE is simply another form of scrapie which "crossed the species barrier".

It would seem therefore that these laboratory sheep were deliberately injected with BSE. If so what guarantee can be given that the product injected did not enter the blood stream of the animal?

Is this how they knew that the sheep were suffering from BSE without showing obvious symptoms?
Had they tested the blood and found the "infective agent"?
We are told that the incubation period can be measured in decades and yet these sheep were recognised as having the disease within 2 years.
When testing to see if the sheep had contracted the disease did the scientists simply find their own injected "infective agent" and not a naturally developing disease?

We have no way of knowing if the sheep used were genetically engineered to be particularly susceptible to BSE, as has been done in other animal species.

Having induced BSE in the sheep they the find what they assume are disease free sheep from New Zealand and transfer the blood from the BSE sheep into the "clean" stock and wait for signs that the disease has developed.
Despite the long incubation period just one of these sheep also showed signs of the disease after just 610 days. The others remain healthy.

How can this be because the BSE sheep themselves were not showing signs?

It would seem that the only way the scientists could establish the presence of the disease in the New Zealand sheep would be to test the blood - the very same blood that they themselves may have contaminated and transferred to the sheep.

This is the equivalent of a painter deliberately using a blue brush in a pot of white paint. He then empties another pot of white paint and pours the tainted blue paint into the new pot expecting it to remain white. Serious questions must be asked about the methods used.
Despite this it seems that only one of the sheep became "infected".

But the questions do not end there.
We are told that BSE is different to scrapie which is why we had the expense of the BSE restrictions and the fear of the disease crossing the species barrier.
We are told that vCJD is equivalent to BSE and indeed that it is likely to have been caused not by injected or transfused product but by ingesting beef. In fact the risks of injected product have largely been dismissed by the scientist involved,

How on earth does science make the jump from experimental results on blood from animals artificially given BSE to the risk of blood products from humans which have eaten beef?
How then does that risk jump a further hurdle to the proclamation of risk of blood products from humans who present no signs of CJD but who have the disease?
If the "infectivity" is so high why is it that only one sheep given deliberately contaminated blood has so far developed the disease.
If the "infectivity" is so high that the surgical instruments used on CJD patients cannot be sterilised why have there been so few cases if blood itself can be made "infective" so easily and sub-clinical cases present such an enormous risk to public health?

Why, when the experts proclaim the risk from ingestion such that a single gramme is capable of "infecting" a half tonne cow, do those same experts pronounce that at the height of the UK BSE epidemic the meat from a cow may have "infected" only one or two of those who ate it.
If sheep can develop this terrible disease within 610 days then why have there not been vast numbers of humans with the disease. Each blood donation given by a person with sub-clinical CJD can be used to treat ten or more people and each would also be given the "infective agent".
Many of the vCJD victims were reported to be blood donors.

Every sign points to the fact that this agent is not as infective as science claims, not even when the material is injected directly.
It is apparent that the controls used in the animal tests are not injected with brain tissue but with saline solutions.
Surely the sensible approach would be to inject tissue from healthy brains so that it can be determined if the injection site does not simply indicate an enzyme replication process which incorporates injected material and not the presence of "infection"?

We know have a terrible situation in which it is clear that if the science is correct then every blood donor should first be screened for vCJD, even though there is no reliable test.
Worse that this the UK has now been forced by this dubious science to import blood products from other countries at great expense even though exactly the same risks are posed by such products.

The UK exported meat, meat animals and the "infected" bone meal around the world and, if the science is correct, we will therefore be importing products with equal or greater risk of "infectivity" being present.

Many European countries have BSE. Many do not employ the controls imposed on the UK and were late in introducing those they did impose.
Despite this the UK allows the import of meat and blood for human use in the hope that it will be safer than that in the UK.

It may take many years before we know what real damage has been caused by the policies which caused the BSE epidemic and the current costly control measures. What is obvious except to those directly involved in the "science" of BSE is that we are not being told the full truth.
Many have the view that the scientists are beginning these scare stories for several reasons.
They can make names for themselves in the scientific community.
Research work is well paid and they can obtain lucrative research grants.
Publishing books on their specialist subjects can bring riches.

Any unproven risk to public health can demand research funds.

Perhaps it is no surprise that the scientists say that the risk from blood products "remains theoretical".

Dated 16/9/2000

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