Correspondent: Mad Cows and an Englishman Tx Date: 25th March 2001 This script was made from audio tape - any inaccuracies are due to voices being unclear or inaudible 00.00.00 Music 00.00.02 Edward Stourton It's an old killer in a new form. And no one knows how many lives it will claim. 00.00.07 Music 00.00.10 Edward Stourton It's called variant CJD and the victims are getting younger and younger. 00.00.14 Music 00.00.16 Edward Stourton The youngest so far, a British girl of just fourteen and it's all blamed on British beef infected with mad cow disease. 00.00.23 Music 00.00.30 Edward Stourton The BSE crisis has now spread across Europe. And it could be a test for a promise that Europe's governments have made to their citizens - the promise to protect the environment. 00.00.40 Edward Stourton They're spending billions of pounds. 00.00.42 Music 00.00.44 Edward Stourton But in the week that the Queniborough CJD cluster has been blamed on eating contaminated beef this farmer has another explanation. 00.00.51 Music 00.00.54 Edward Stourton For nearly two decades Mark Purdey has been dismissed as a maverick. 00.00.57 Music 00.00.59 Edward Stourton He could soon be hailed as a visionary. 00.01.01 Music 00.01.07 Edward Stourton His story is one of a struggle for the right to a safe environment. 00.01.12 Correspondent theme music 00.01.23 Title Page MAD COWS AND AN ENLISHMAN The Right to Environmental Protection 00.01.36 Edward Stourton Arnaud Eboli is twenty, the third French victim of variant CJD. So far France is the only country outside Britain to be hit. 00.01.48 Edward Stourton The clear-eyed teenager looking out of the family's photographs is a reminder of what they've lost. 00.01.57 Edward Stourton Arnaud is confined to bed twenty-four hours a day and is incapable of communication. 00.02.08 Aston DOMINIQUE EBOLI Voice over From around September '98 he started to have tantrums at us without us having hardly said a word, breaking everything and fighting with us. His behaviour completely changed. Our doctor said it was just teenage nervous depression. He had problems walking and then loss of memory and he was put into hospital in November and they gave us the diagnosis on Christmas Eve 1999. 00.02.40 Dominique Eboli Voice over When he had the hysteria attacks he kept telling us; 'I'm going mad, I've got mad cow'. He didn't stop telling us. And we would say; 'no, you're just depressed'. He didn't believe us. He had a premonition and that will always stay with us. 00.03.06 Music 00.03.14 Edward Stourton The drive to understand the disease that's killing Arnaud has brought Mark Purdey to France. 00.03.19 Music 00.03.21 Edward Stourton His video diary records a scientific odyssey that has taken him right across Europe and beyond. 00.03.26 Music 00.03.29 Edward Stourton He's driven by the conviction that the mainstream scientists have got it wrong. 00.03.33 Edward Stourton They say BSE comes from infected meat and bone meal and CJD comes from infected beef. He believes the key lies not in the food humans and cows eat but in the environment around us - an elusive factor X. 00.03.48 Mark Purdey I've just been hunting around in these bergamot orange orchards to see what kind of pesticides they've been using. And I came across about twenty canisters of this compound. This would make you susceptible to prion disease. 00.04.04 Edward Stourton If he's right we need to rethink everything about the battle against Europe's biggest public health crisis. 00.04.09 Music 00.04.13 Edward Stourton The story begins on his farm in Somerset in the days when BSE hadn't even been discovered. 00.04.21 Edward Stourton Mark Purdey was farming organically long before it became fashionable. And his determination to resist the use of chemicals on his livestock soon got him into trouble with the Ministry of Agriculture. 00.04.42 Music 00.04.43 Aston Reconstruction 00.04.44 Edward Stourton Nearly two decades ago an unwelcome visitor arrived at the farm gates. 00.04.49 Music 00.04.51 Mark Purdey It was one morning in November 1984 when a ministry official arrived at my front door and said that I had to treat with this insecticide because our whole area was under threat from this parasite known as the warble fly. 00.05.06 Music 00.05.10 Edward Stourton The warble fly lays its eggs under the skin of cattle. The larvae don't hurt the cows but they do damage their productivity. 00.05.19 Edward Stourton The solution from the Ministry of Agriculture - MAFF - was a powerful organophosphate pesticide. 00.05.25 Edward Stourton Farmers were told they had to use it. 00.05.29 Aston MARK PURDEY This chemical was actually poured along from the base of the head of the cow, along the back line. It was designed to go through the skin, poison the whole internal environment of the cow so to annihilate any internal parasites that lived inside such as the warble fly. 00.05.37 Aston Reconstruction 00.05.48 Edward Stourton You were a farmer, obviously a farmer concerned about this. What did you do? 00.05.52 Mark Purdey Well I refused to use this particular chemical and I, the upshot was a high court case. I took out a high court judicial review against MAFF because I argued that MAFF were not empowered to forcibly treat cows with this chemical dressing. And the high court judge just agreed, well yes and I won the day. 00.06.15 Edward Stourton It was to prove the first step on a scientific journey that's dominated his life ever since. 00.06.24 Edward Stourton Two years later in 1986 a frightening new disease was identified in cattle - BSE or mad cow disease as we came to call it. 00.06.32 Edward Stourton Mark Purdey was convinced it was man-made and his culprit of first choice was the very organophosphate treatment used for warble fly. 00.06.40 Mark Purdey I started looking at the scientific literature and looking at organophosphates. I also looked at the areas where BSE was emerging and I looked at the areas where the warble fly treatment had been used compulsorily. And I did find a clear cut correlation between, a pattern, a distribution between the areas where warble fly treatment was used and the areas where BSE subsequently emerged about six years later. 00.07.07 Aston Reconstruction 00.07.11 Edward Stourton Mark Purdey was convinced that the pesticides must have caused BSE because the disease first emerged where these chemicals were being used. 00.07.20 Edward Stourton Trouble was it wasn't a perfect correlation was it? 00.07.22 Mark Purdey No. 00.07.23 Edward Stourton I mean the Ministry of Agriculture cites, for example Guernsey, no warble fly treatment but it does have BSE. 00.07.28 Mark Purdey Yes but this same chemical was also used for other applications not just warble fly. So farmers were using this chemical voluntarily. 00.07.37 Music 00.07.38 Mark Purdey Hurry up, we're going to be late. 00.07.41 Edward Stourton The search for more evidence to support his theory took Mark Purdey to Europe. 00.07.46 Edward Stourton He believes this a story about the way Europe as a whole looks after the environment, not just a story of British farming getting it wrong. 00.07.53 Music 00.07.57 Edward Stourton If Switzerland means cuckoo clocks it also means cow bells. 00.08.01 Edward Stourton And it was the first country on the continent to see cases of BSE. 00.08.05 Music 00.08.07 Edward Stourton The Swiss blamed British meat and bone meal for bringing the disease within their borders. 00.08.12 Edward Stourton But an organic farmer just outside Zurich contacted Mark Purdey with an alternative explanation. 00.08.18 Edward Stourton In an echo of his case against the Ministry of Agriculture, Urs Hans has been fighting the Swiss government in the courts. 00.08.27 Edward Stourton He too has been resisting an order to use a pesticide on his cows - the very same kind of chemical used in Britain to kill the warble fly. 00.08.35 Mark Purdey Why do you think, Urs, that there's a problem of BSE in Switzerland when we have it in England in such a big way? 00.08.41 Aston URS HANS Yeah, the thing is that also in Switzerland we, we tried or the government tried to eradicate the warble flies. 00.08.52 Edward Stourton Not only do the Swiss use the same kind of pesticide they apply it in the same way. 00.09.00 Mark Purdey How would you put it on the cow? 00.09.03 Urs Hans Yeah, it's a very simple method you just pour it on the back of the cow. Actually on the best part of the meat and people later on will eat. 00.09.12 Mark Purdey Yeah, I mean do you think it's a coincidence because BSE starts in the spinal cord and you're pouring it along the spine aren't you? 00.09.21 Urs Hans Yeah, I think even a child could understand that, if one treats a cow with nerve poison that the nerve lines which are laying just below could be harmed. 00.09.39 Edward Stourton The more Mark Purdey found out about the Swiss experience, the more convinced he became about his theory. 00.09.47 Edward Stourton By blaming British meat and bone meal the Swiss were following conventional wisdom. But it didn't quite add up. 00.09.55 Edward Stourton The official figures revealed that the amount of supposedly contaminated feed brought in from Britain was minuscule. 00.10.09 Edward Stourton Yet the Swiss BSE crisis has been among the most devastating in Europe, keeping its slaughterhouses busy with the cull. 00.10.17 Edward Stourton Even now, years after the Swiss introduced a total ban on meat and bone meal feed, new cases of mad cow disease keep coming up in the hundreds of samples of cattle brain sent for analysis each week. 00.10.31 Mark Purdey Great Britain exported thousands of tons of meat and bone meal. And if micro doses of this meat and bone meal can cause fifty thousand cases of BSE then the mega amounts of meat and bone meal that were sold all over the world, the thousands of tons, then why hasn't this caused mega amounts of BSE in these other countries? 00.10.53 Edward Stourton The first ever test for BSE was developed here in Switzerland. The man who invented it believes Mark Purdey's on to something. 00.11.00 Edward Stourton Bruno Oesch doesn't buy the official line about how the disease is passed on. 00.11.05 Aston Dr BRUNO OESCH The question now is are there alternative ways of transmission, which scientifically we have not been able to pin down. And my gut feeling clearly is that most probably there are alternative way of transmission and we have to pin them down now, as rapidly as possible because if we don't pin them we are going to spread BSE. It's going to get endemic like sheep's scrapie in France, the UK, also other countries and this is going to be a disaster. 00.11.44 Music 00.11.48 Edward Stourton What he'd found in Europe reinforced his convictions. But to convince others Mark Purdey needed credibility. 00.11.55 Edward Stourton So he set about teaching himself to be a scientist and each evening after a full day's work on the farm he settled down with his books. 00.12.01 Music 00.12.04 Edward Stourton It meant mastering chemistry and biology to a level where he could publish his theories in academic journals. 00.12.11 Edward Stourton But the government's own scientists were still marching down a different avenue. 00.12.17 Edward Stourton John Wilesmith co-ordinated the government's response to BSE and is still in charge of monitoring it today. 00.12.25 Aston JOHN WILESMITH Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Well my own working hypothesis and I think it's, it's sort of maintained by quite a large body of scientists who know the field is, you know, an origin from sheep scrapie. And really that is based on the fact that we've got a very large sheep population, particularly in relation to cattle. 00.12.47 Edward Stourton The ministry's idea was that scrapie, a BSE-like disease that occurs in sheep, had been transmitted to cows by feeding them the ground up remains of infected animals. 00.12.58 Edward Stourton The trouble was they couldn't prove it. It was all based on circumstantial evidence about the way the disease spread, what the men from the ministry called its epidemiology. 00.13.09 Edward Stourton I mean you've looked, presumably, quite hard for some evidence to support your hypothesis that scrapie... 00.13.15 John Wilesmith For the scrapie yes. 00.13.16 Edward Stourton ...and found none, so far? 00.13.17 John Wilesmith Yes, I mean it's built up on the epidemiological picture. 00.13.22 Edward Stourton But there's nothing to demonstrate that that is indeed what happened. I mean you say it's possible but it... 00.13.27 John Wilesmith Absolutely, I mean we can never say is anything is certain. 00.13.31 Edward Stourton Mark Purdey's challenge to the official explanation for BSE soon attracted public attention. 00.13.37 Edward Stourton And he began to suspect that it was making him enemies. 00.13.43 Mark Purdey During the 1980's I had a long series of sort of rather bizarre happenings happened on my farm, to people who were involved with me in, to do with my work. It was always in instances that were focused around my particular activities involved with my work against organophosphates. 00.14.09 Edward Stourton At the height of the BSE crisis, Mark Purdey achieved something of a public relations coup - a piece in one of the national dailies. 00.14.18 Edward Stourton But things went suddenly and mysteriously wrong. 00.14.22 Mark Purdey I was expecting a lot of follow-up calls from the media as I usually did. Eventually one film crew arrived. 00.14.31 Reporter Mr Purdey says the cow he's named Brainstorm blows holes in the latest theories on BSE, which claim.... 00.14.37 Mark Purdey They actually filmed and showed my phone line had been cut in at least two places, was strewn all the way down my front driveway and this was the reason why none of the media could get through to me on that morning. 00.14.50 Mark Purdey But I mean I've got no evidence that any of this was linked. It just seems to be common sense that it was linked to my work because of the timing of the events etc. etc. 00.15.03 Edward Stourton It didn't stop him but he has paid a price for his commitment. Fighting a one-man rebellion like this could never be cost free. 00.15.12 Mark Purdey This is a Friesian cow and we've got Jersey's haven't we? Jerseys, yeah. 00.15.19 Mark Purdey It's had its sort of repercussions particularly in family life, you know. Understandably my wife and children, I have six children, have been very fed up with not getting enough of my attention and I feel very guilty for that. But in a sense I would hope that the work I'm doing is looking after sort of future generations. 00.15.43 Edward Stourton Would you accept you've been a bit obsessive about it? 00.15.47 Mark Purdey Yes I suppose I've been obsessive in a way but I mean society needs extremists, they need obsessive individuals who can really get to the root of something and put all their energy into it. 00.15.59 Music 00.16.02 Edward Stourton A man who spent more time mucking out than attending conferences was bound to find it very hard to get anyone to take his theory seriously. 00.16.09 Music 00.16.13 Edward Stourton But slowly his academic work was beginning to pay off. 00.16.16 Music 00.16.18 Edward Stourton And starting to earn him admirers in the mainstream. 00.16.21 Music 00.16.26 Edward Stourton Doctor David Brown from Cambridge University was to become one of his most enthusiastic supporters. 00.16.31 Music 00.16.37 Edward Stourton You're quite rare among scientists in taking Mark Purdey seriously aren't you? 00.16.41 Aston Dr DAVID BROWN Cambridge University I think I'm quite rare in standing up in public and saying that I take him seriously. I think quite a number of people take his new work seriously. You know scientists get the reputation for being mad a lot of the time and I think that's not particularly completely wrong so I think many scientists are quite eccentric characters as well, although I'm not saying Mark is particularly eccentric. But I think, I don't really think it's his personality that's the cause of the problem, it's simply the system is set up so that you have to have these six letters after your name before you're taken seriously by most other scientists. 00.17.19 Edward Stourton Support too from an impeccably establishment source - the local MP, who also happened to be the senior Tory cabinet minister, Tom King. 00.17.30 Aston TOM KING MP I have had enough scientific presentations made to me in my time as a minister and I had certain reserve that I'd found that government scientists weren't always right. And I just had perhaps been around long enough to know that the first reply of official government views sometimes needed to be questioned and examined a bit harder. 00.17.56 Edward Stourton Millions of pounds of public money were being spent - the stakes in this scientific debate could not have been higher. 00.18.04 Dr David Brown I think the general view of what caused BSE is wrong. It assumes a number of things, which are not at all proven. The first is that the infection, which is occurring now throughout Europe, is a result of this meal, this infected meal. There's no evidence that the meal that was used in Europe was ever infected. I don't believe that this initiated BSE. 00.18.29 Edward Stourton Just to be absolutely clear about this, you're saying that meat and bone meal may be a factor in passing on the disease, yes? 00.18.34 Dr David Brown Yes. 00.18.35 Edward Stourton But it is absolutely not the cause of it? 00.18.37 Dr David Brown I don't see any reason to think it is the cause of it. 00.18.40 Music 00.18.49 Edward Stourton By 1997 Mark Purdey had reached a deadlock in his struggle with the ministry. The only way forward was to find some hard scientific evidence to back up his theory. 00.18.58 Music 00.19.05 Mark Purdey So I thought well, I better set about challenging my own theory. And I then had the option of raising money from my own money and well-wishers etc to run our own trial. 00.19.18 Music 00.19.23 Edward Stourton This trial would mean performing an experiment with the prion, the mysterious agent believed to be the cause of BSE. 00.19.29 Music 00.19.36 Edward Stourton Prions are proteins produced in the brains of both humans and animals. 00.19.40 Music 00.19.42 Edward Stourton Normally a prion only exists for a few hours before it's broken down and reabsorbed but in diseases like BSE something happens to the prion to make it almost indestructible. 00.19.51 Music 00.19.56 Edward Stourton Not only does it become indestructible it also takes on the ability to change other normal prions into a newly infectious form. 00.20.06 Music 00.20.08 Edward Stourton A chain reaction occurs causing the protein to collect in the cells of the brain, building up until the cells are overwhelmed and finally die, leaving the trademark sponge like holes to appear in the brain. 00.20.19 Music 00.20.23 Edward Stourton There's currently no way to halt this process which ultimately results in death. 00.20.30 Edward Stourton Mark Purdey believed that the pesticide used to kill the warble fly could trigger this chain reaction. 00.20.36 Edward Stourton He raised six thousand pounds to test a pesticide called phosmet and collaborated with Doctor Stephen Whatley, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. 00.20.47 Aston Dr STEPHEN WHATLEY Institute of Psychiatry Mark and I got together and had several chats over the phone and we decided to collaborate on looking at the effects of phosmet on nerve cells, which are grown in a dish. What we did was we took cells and we treated them with phosmet for a couple of days and then looked at its effects on the cellular prion protein. 00.21.10 Mark Purdey It was really sort of a precarious, knife-edge point in my whole sort of career as it were. It was really like sort of waiting for an exam result to come through after years of work - was I going to be successful or you know, was the whole lot just going to go down the pan. 00.21.29 Music 00.21.30 Edward Stourton For two days it all hung in the balance - all the hours of study, the journeys in search of evidence, the money spent on research. 00.21.37 Music 00.21.39 Edward Stourton The results, when they came, simply added to the mystery. 00.21.42 Music 00.21.46 Dr Stephen Whatley Our results were that if you treat cells with phosmet over a couple of days the amount of cellular prion protein on the outside of the cell is greatly increased by about ten fold. 00.21.59 Edward Stourton So there was an effect - pesticides could cause far more prions than normal to be created. But that wasn't the whole story. 00.22.05 Music 00.22.06 Mark Purdey I was mightily relieved. I mean, they did show positive results but perhaps slightly depressingly they hadn't reproduced the major change to the prion protein. 00.22.18 Music 00.22.20 Edward Stourton He'd hoped to see a change to the infectious form of the prion found in BSE. That didn't happen. 00.22.26 Music 00.22.28 Edward Stourton But, as the BSE inquiry later confirmed, the creation of more prions did mean that pesticides could make animals more susceptible to the disease. 00.22.36 Music 00.22.38 Edward Stourton He was onto something but he'd missed something too. Pesticide alone was not that factor X. 00.22.44 Music 00.22.47 Edward Stourton Meanwhile the Ministry of Agriculture was still sticking to the same old guns. 00.22.51 News Report ...nearly eight years ago, it's thought cows got the disease from eating food made from the carcasses of sheep which had scrapie... 00.22.58 Edward Stourton The truth was that no one fully understood BSE. But that didn't stop the politicians trying to reassure the public. 00.23.03 Aston BBC News 16th May 1990 00.23.05 News Reporter Agriculture Minister John Gummer today enrolled his daughter Cordelia in his campaign to persuade people that eating beef is safe. 00.23.13 John Gummer There is no need for people to be worried and I can say perfectly honestly that I shall go on eating beef as my children will go on eating beef because there is no need to be worried. Now you can't do anything more than that. 00.23.25 Music 00.23.27 Edward Stourton Then the worst consumer nightmare became a reality. 00.23.31 Edward Stourton In 1995 variant CJD claimed its first victim. 00.23.35 Edward Stourton After telling people for so long that it was safe to eat beef, the government scientists changed their minds and said that BSE in beef could cause CJD in humans. 00.23.48 Edward Stourton Many of the families of the victims of variant CJD feel they weren't warned early enough about the risk of beef. 00.23.56 Edward Stourton For the Eboli's the theory that their son contracted his illness through something he ate seems like common sense. 00.24.08 Aston DOMINIQUE EBOLI Voice over It seems to me it was in the mincemeat because you've got the brain, the offal, all contaminated in mince. We ate frozen mince and we also ate ravioli and Arnaud loved fast food. In those days he used to meet his friends at fast food joints. So I think it was in the mincemeat. 00.24.33 Edward Stourton But Mark Purdey was still pursuing his search for that elusive factor X he believed would provide the key. 00.24.42 Edward Stourton Despite the millions of pounds poured into research, no one seemed able to prove the official story that you could catch CJD by eating BSE infected beef. 00.24.52 Mark Purdey After the Institute of Psychiatry work, that showed that organophosphates have some role in the cause of the disease but not the whole role. So I needed to go back to square one and try and find out this missing link in the causal jigsaw of prion diseases. 00.25.11 Edward Stourton It meant going back to the textbooks. And this wasn't simple science; it was the kind of thing that would baffle most university graduates. 00.25.21 Mark Purdey I only went as far as A levels and when it came round to me doing this research it was perhaps at the start quite daunting when you ordered up a paper from a journal and it was way beyond PhD level. But I think if there's a will there's a way, you know and when you're enthusiastic about a subject you just get around it, no matter what. 00.25.47 Edward Stourton He learnt that there was a family of illnesses related to BSE known as spongiform or prion diseases. It included BSE, scrapie in sheep and CJD in humans. 00.25.58 Music 00.26.01 Edward Stourton To track down that factor X, which connected them, he planned his most ambitious journey to date. It would take three years to complete. 00.26.12 Mark Purdey Well I devised this really exciting hands-on project to go around the world visiting these very isolated pockets where spongiform disease was clustering at a very high incidence rate. Firstly I went to Colorado where the disease occurs in deer and elk. 00.26.30 Music 00.26.38 Mark Purdey Then I went to Iceland where certain valleys have the highest incidence rate of scrapie in the world. 00.26.44 Music 00.26.45 Mark Purdey I'm looking for a geological map. 00.26.46 Man Yes. 00.26.47 Mark Purdey Because we're studying a disease in Iceland called Rida. 00.26.50 Man Rida? 00.26.51 Mark Purdey Yes and Rida occurs in these three, this area and.... 00.26.57 Music 00.26.59 Mark Purdey Then I went to Calabria in Italy... 00.27.01 Music 00.27.03 Mark Purdey And it's here that there is a very high incidence rate of CJD amongst the local population. 00.27.08 Music 00.27.10 Mark Purdey And I finally ended up going to two villages where the highest incidence rate of CJD occurs in the world and these were located in the high Tatra mountains of Slovakia. 00.27.21 Music 00.27.32 Edward Stourton This region has the unenviable reputation of being the world capital of CJD. 00.27.37 Music 00.27.40 Edward Stourton One in a thousand people here get the disease. For the rest of us the chances are one in a million. 00.27.46 Music 00.27.54 Edward Stourton Eva Mitrova discovered the original cluster, she's one of the country's leading experts in the field. 00.28.00 Edward Stourton On this morning the local hospital has asked her to examine a patient they suspect has contracted CJD. 00.28.09 Eva Mitrova Subtitles These cases of CJD are usually lively and bright... until the breaking point, which is more obvious. 00.28.16 Doctor Subtitle I hope she doesn't have it. 00.28.20 Eva Mitrova Subtitle We may wish it were not CJD, but that's another thing. 00.28.33 Edward Stourton The patient Eva has been asked to investigate is fifty-five. She's already been examined by the hospital's staff but the neurologist here couldn't make a definite diagnosis. 00.28.50 Doctor Subtitle Good morning Mrs Polackova. 00.28.51 Eva Mitrova Subtitles Hello, Mrs Polackova. I wanted to ask you what the name of your mother was. 00.29.06 Nurse Subtitles Can you remember? What was your mother's name, Mrs Polackova? 00.29.13 Eva Mitrova Subtitles That's OK...go to sleep now. Goodbye. 00.29.28 Aston Dr EVA MITROVA Institute of Preventative Medicine It is a new classical CJD suspect case where a relatively young lady very quickly was, her personality was very quickly destroyed. I was trying to communicate with her, which was impossible. She had impressions that we know each other for a long time. I ask of her the name of her and her mother - she was not able to answer. 00.29.55 Music 00.29.59 Edward Stourton One of the reasons this area has suffered so heavily from CJD is genetic. It's a remote area where families often inter-marry and there's a high incidence of the gene, which makes people prone to CJD. 00.30.10 Music 00.30.13 Dr Eva Mitrova Outside the clustering areas we have one, two cases per year, so, per million inhabitants. But here and also in the southern part of Slovakia, it is more than five hundred and in some villages even more than one thousand. 00.30.34 Edward Stourton Common sense might say that if there is a genetic factor at play in a place like this that would actually explain the clusters by itself. 00.30.41 Dr Eva Mitrova We cannot explain all our finding only by genetics. This is the reason why we need to search for something else. 00.30.51 Edward Stourton You're convinced there must be something else at work? 00.30.53 Dr Eva Mitrova It looks like. As soon as we can explain all our data and finding with genetic only factor or influence, we probably will be happy but up to now it is not possible to explain everything. 00.31.16 Edward Stourton Mark Purdey was also convinced that there was something else at work and he believed that something, that elusive factor X, was to be found in the environment. 00.31.29 Mark Purdey I did a complete screening of these environments where spongiform disease occurs. I sampled the foliage or vegetables or whatever the particular animals and humans were eating in these environments. I sampled the soil and I sampled the water supplies that the infected animals and humans were drinking. And I also took samples in disease free areas adjoining so I had a good control. 00.31.57 Music 00.31.59 Edward Stourton This is what he found. 00.32.01 Edward Stourton Manganese is a metal that's essential for normal bodily function. Healthy amounts are found naturally in fruits, vegetables and nuts. 00.32.10 Edward Stourton But Mark Purdey knew that if the balance between manganese and other metals, especially copper, was disturbed then things could go seriously wrong with the brain. 00.32.19 Explosion 00.32.22 Edward Stourton There's historical evidence for this from those involved in mining manganese for use in the steel industry. 00.32.27 Music 00.32.29 Edward Stourton Anyone who was exposed to large amounts of manganese dust was liable to develop a condition known as 'manganese madness' - a form of permanent brain damage caused by inhaling manganese particles. 00.32.41 Mark Purdey When I got home I packaged the samples off and sent them to the laboratories for Natural Resources Management Limited who are, you know, the laboratory in Britain. And I found the same pattern as I'd found in Iceland and Colorado, high levels of manganese and very, very low levels of copper and various other minerals like selenium and zinc etc. 00.33.10 Edward Stourton And that presumably persuaded you that you were on the right track? 00.33.13 Mark Purdey Oh very much so, I mean I was really over the moon when I got the samples back from the lab. 00.33.20 Music 00.33.23 Edward Stourton The factor X theory was taking shape. Wherever Mark had tested and there was disease there was an excess of manganese and low levels of copper. 00.33.32 Edward Stourton In areas free of disease the levels of these minerals appeared to return to normal. 00.33.36 Music 00.33.40 Edward Stourton The next step was to discover how these high levels of manganese in the environment could be getting into the food chain. 00.33.45 Music 00.33.48 Mark Purdey I was aware from my Colorado research that pine needles concentrate the metal manganese. So in Slovakia, for instance, I also needed to see if the local people were perhaps using these pine needles in their dietary intake by gaining the help of an interpreter and she actually found out for me that the local people were in fact using pine needles to make a brew, a kind of tea. 00.34.17 Interpreter ...mixture of the herbs and needles and then she will put a small piece of that into cup and then she pours water, hot water over it. She leaves it for a while and then her drink is ready actually. Well she's drinking it mainly in winter. 00.34.37 Mark Purdey How many times a day? 00.34.49 Interpreter Well, once or twice a day. Well, in the morning and in the evening, so, well it's a lovely drink actually. 00.34.57 Edward Stourton Another source of manganese for people in the area was this steel works. 00.35.02 Edward Stourton The steel industry uses large amounts of manganese and the fumes from the factory dispersed manganese all along the valley. 00.35.13 Mark Purdey What with breathing in manganese on a daily basis, these locals were also unwittingly taking in a high load of manganese in the very pine needles that they were using in their tea. 00.35.26 Edward Stourton There was another piece of the jigsaw that needed to be slotted into place. 00.35.30 Edward Stourton If manganese is the factor X Mark Purdey had been searching for, how has it been getting into cows right across Europe? 00.35.37 Edward Stourton His explanation is the mineral supplements they are fed. 00.35.43 Mark Purdey It was common practice on dairy farms to feed these free access minerals. Cows could come at will and take a small amount in but some cows would develop a rather bizarre fetish and pig out on the minerals and take in a great load. This was very worrying particularly as manganese was put in so those cows would in a sense get poisoned chronically with high levels of this manganese. 00.36.10 Mark Purdey And this practice was carried out in all of the countries where BSE has emerged. The intensive farming systems used this throughout Europe. 00.36.19 Edward Stourton Manganese had been added to cattle feeds in the never-ending search for higher productivity. Little did anyone realise it might end up killing the cows. 00.36.27 Music 00.36.30 Edward Stourton By now the maverick farmer's journey in search of factor X had taken him to the very heart of the academic establishment. 00.36.36 Music 00.36.39 Edward Stourton At Cambridge Doctor David Brown devised an experiment to see what happened when the prion was starved of copper and exposed to manganese. 00.36.48 Aston Dr DAVID BROWN Cambridge University We work on prion protein and what we did is associate it with the ability of the protein to bind metals. Normally the prion protein binds copper and what we did that was of interest to the work that Mark has been doing is that we replaced the copper with manganese. And we found that when the manganese binds at the site of where the copper normally does then it changes the conformation of the protein. That is it changes its structure. 00.37.20 Music 00.37.23 Edward Stourton David Brown had shown in the lab what Mark believed was happening in Slovakia. 00.37.27 Music 00.37.31 Edward Stourton Prions starved of copper and dosed with manganese would change their shape into the dangerous form of the prion. 00.37.37 Music 00.37.39 Edward Stourton Although the step beyond that is yet to be proved, the assumption must be that the prion they created like this can trigger CJD and BSE. 00.37.53 Edward Stourton And there's more to emerge from this laboratory. David Brown's group is about to publish another piece of research inspired by Mark Purdey's work. 00.38.00 Music 00.38.02 Edward Stourton They've been examining the brains of people who've died from CJD. 00.38.06 Music 00.38.08 Dr David Brown In collaboration with a group in Cleveland we've been looking at patients with CJD. This is not the variant CJD that people are associating with BSE, it's simply the more common, sporadic form of human prion disease. And basically we found that the brains of patients with CJD actually have much higher levels of manganese. 00.38.31 Edward Stourton When you say much higher, how much higher? 00.38.34 Dr David Brown About ten fold higher. 00.38.35 Edward Stourton That sounds very significant indeed. 00.38.37 Dr David Brown Yes it is. 00.38.38 Music 00.38.41 Edward Stourton At the heart of Mark Purdey's theory is the idea that two factors are at work - an imbalance of metals in our brains and pesticides which make us more vulnerable. 00.38.51 Edward Stourton So eating beef could be the least of our worries. 00.38.54 Music 00.38.58 Edward Stourton What about the effect of eating beef? Does that cause people to catch CJD? 00.39.03 Dr David Brown That again is a huge speculation and it's been blown completely out of proportion. There are good experiments that have been done to suggest that CJD, the variant CJD and BSE are very similar diseases but it does not prove that one caused the other. 00.39.24 Edward Stourton There's still more work to be done on Mark Purdey's theory. 00.39.27 Edward Stourton The evidence has got steadily stronger - though not strong enough to convince everyone that he should be taken seriously. 00.39.36 Aston JOHN WILESMITH Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Mark Purdey's hypotheses are a little difficult for us to sort of contend with and sort of come to terms with because they have changed considerably over the years in going from, you know, more or less a straight intoxication poisoning as a result of using organophosphates for warble fly treatment to rather more sophisticated things as things have moved on. 00.40.00 Edward Stourton In a way you are very much in the position that you accuse the conventional scientists of being, aren't you? Lots of hypothesis, lots of suppositions but nothing actually proved. 00.40.10 Mark Purdey Well, I would be inclined to disagree. I mean we're a long way towards proving the role of manganese, high manganese and low copper in the disease as the kind of central core of the disease process. 00.40.24 Mark Purdey I've proved the presence of high manganese and low copper in all of the environments where spongiform disease occurs. What have the establishment done towards proving their theory? Absolutely nothing. And I think in terms of all the theories that are afloat about spongiform disease at the moment it is this theory that, that has backing and is nearer to proof than any of the other theories. 00.40.50 Edward Stourton There are still all sorts of uncertainties. Shouldn't you be taking a look at some of Mark Purdey's ideas, some of David Brown's ideas? 00.40.59 John Wilesmith Yes, I just feel that one can only do a certain amount of things at a time and my, my job at the moment or you know, what my research funding is really is to keep a very, very close eye on the epidemic. And I think it's for others to put forward projects on manganese. 00.41.20 Edward Stourton But the evidence keeps building. This week the official enquiry into the Queniborough CJD cluster blamed local butchery practices. But Mark Purdey has conducted his own tests. 00.41.32 Mark Purdey In Queniborough and the other variant CJD mini-clusters that I've looked at I've found very, very high, excessive levels of manganese, more than twice what I found in Slovakia. So this shows once again that this manganese connection is central to variant CJD and normal CJD clusters. 00.41.53 Edward Stourton With results like these it's perhaps not surprising that the Ministry of Agriculture seems finally to have woken up to the significance of Mark Purdey's work. Last month he received an application form for a grant. 00.42.06 Mark Purdey It's not just a question of cow's lives and academic egos at stake here. It's a question of young people who are dying of this grotesque new variant CJD. But at least MAFF are beginning to take it more seriously now. But why didn't they do this fifteen years ago then we could have avoided this whole catastrophe perhaps. 00.42.28 Music 00.42.32 Edward Stourton No one knows how many victims variant CJD will claim. No one knows where else outside Britain the disease will appear. 00.42.39 Music 00.42.40 Edward Stourton Until the causes of this killer are pinned down, Europe's governments cannot keep their promise to secure a safe environment for their citizens. 00.42.49 Music 00.42.54 Dominique Eboli Voice over Our only hope is that Arnaud dies as quickly as possible. Because when you are just twenty years old and stuck in bed, paralysed and staring at a wall all day long, that's not a life. It's wretched for a mother to say that. But when you love your child that's what you wish for. 00.43.12 End Music 00.43.25 Credits www.bbc.co.uk/correspondent Reporter EDWARD STOURTON Photography JON STAPLETON Sound WALTER UHRIK Dubbing Mixer CLIFF JONES VT Editor JASPAL BANGA Graphic Design NICOLA OWEN Production Team ASTRA CURZON JULIA DANNENBERG RACHALE DAVIES MARTHA ESTCOURT VLADIMIRA POPIKOVA Production Manager JANE WILLEY Unit Manager IRENE OZGA Film Research NICK DODD Research JO DUTTON VIRGINIA MUCCHI JOHN THYNNE Film Editor ROBERT MOORE Produced & Directed by LEO TELLING Executive Producer FARAH DURRANI 00.43.44 Series Producer KATE SNELL (c)BBC MMI 00.43.47 End 1 BBC Correspondent 21 1