I remember reading that a researcher in Britain discovered there was a link between certain pesticides and Vanadium(turns out its copper deficiency combined with excess Manganese) deficient soils. I
I wasn't interested at the time, as I didn't eat beef, so I didn't follow up on it.
I did a bit of checking and found this... and modified my post
English farmer Mark Purdey says that Mad Cow Disease is really Manganese Madness.
Purdey notes that feeding cattle the meat and bone meal from other cows was banned in Britain in 1988, but despite this fact, 40,000 cattle born there after the ban have come down with Mad Cow. In Ireland, Portugal, and France, there have also been more cases after the meat and bone meal feed was banned in these countries.
Mark Purdey runs an organic farm, so in 1984, when the English government ruled that all cattle had to be treated with the insecticide Phosmet, applied along their spines, he went to court and won the right not to do it. The next year, Mad Cow Disease appeared in Britain. Purdey says that no cows born and raised on organic farms and not treated with Phosmet have ever developed the disease, even though many of them were fed on meat and bone meal. Also, Britain was exporting large amounts of meat and bone meal to countries such as India, South Africa and Saudi Arabia, but none of the cattle there developed the disease.
In order to test his theory, Purdey hired psychiatrist Stephen Whatley to dose brain cell cultures with Phosmet to see if this would create the rogue prions. The tests caused some deformation of the prion proteins, but not the exact kind found in Mad cow Disease.
Purdey then began searching for unusual conditions in areas with a high incidence of Mad Cow Disease and found very low levels of copper in the soil, along with abnormally high levels of manganese. He discovered a condition called "Manganese Madness" in manganese miners that has the same symptoms as CJD (the human form of Mad Cow). Manganese can substitute for copper in an animal or human body, if there is a copper deficiency.
Purdey went to researcher David Brown, who "…ran the necessary cell-culture experiments, in which he introduced manganese into copper-depleted prion protein cell cultures." He also found that Phosmet chelates copper out of the bodies of the cattle, thus leading to the copper deficiency that allows Mad Cow Disease to develop. He thinks Britain has the world's highest rate of Mad Cow because all farmers must treat their cattle's spines with Phosmet. Farmers there also use an artificial milk substitute for calves which has up to 1,000 times the level of manganese found in natural cow's milk.
Purdey studied "kuru," a prion disease that affects many of the Fore tribe in New Guinea who practice cannibalism. He found that many other New Guinea tribes are cannibals but only the Fores get kuru. Purdey traveled there and found the local soils deficient in copper.
He believes that if people are worried about getting CJD, the best thing to do is to take a mineral supplement that gives them an adequate amount of copper.
John
