planorganic.com 

Veterinary   Updated March 2004  Email me: 
Foot and mouth disease 
BSE and CJD
A Naturopath's Perspective

Two letters of mine, widely published at the height of the FMD crisis
Avoid apocalypse in Ireland 
A Mad, Cow, Sheep and Pig Slaughter Policy

Organic Remedies and references

Mastitis and mastitis control strategies in organic herds. Researchers at Reading University in the UK say there is a need to develop new mastitis control strategies for organic dairy producers. The recent, rapid growth of the organic dairy sector in the UK has highlighted mastitis as one of the key health concerns among organic dairy farmers and the unsuitability of the Five Point Plan for organic management practices.
A two-year (1997-98) longitudinal mastitis survey of organic dairy herds in England and Wales suggested that, whilst mastitis risk for organic cows was no greater than for conventionally managed cows, some herds experienced problems with high levels of mastitis during the dry period. Overall, organic herds had higher somatic cell count (SCC) levels. The treatment strategies for organic and conventional herds differed markedly, with the majority of organic dairy farms using homeopathy as an alternative to antibiotics. Control strategies, however, were similar in both groups of farms, apart from less emphasis on SCC control in organic herds compared to the conventionally managed herds. In the light of these findings, the researchers suggest a new management strategy for a sustainable udder health promotion in organic dairy herds. For further information, contact Malla Hovi (m.hovi@reading.ac.uk).Reference: Hovi, M. and Roderick, S. (2000) Mastitis and mastitis control strategies in organic milk. Cattle Practice 8(3) 259-264. 
www.veeru.reading.ac.uk/organic/ and www.organic-vet.reading.ac.uk/ The vet there who will help with enquiries is Malla Hovi.  

TB or not TB ..Do you know that Bovine Tuberculosis was officially declared eradicated in the Republic of Ireland in 1965?
Since then we have spent € 1.5 billion eradicating Bovine TB!
Badgers are being blamed at present for causing the still high incidence of TB in cattle. There are 4 pilot schemes in place to eradicate the creatures, estimated to number 50,000 throughout the island. Although hopefully sanity will prevail and they will adopt the policy of eradicating TB in badgers.

Worms Papaya seed tablets have given dramatic results in eliminating worms from goats - even after other remedies failed. There's a regime to be followed: if interested, contact me by email and I will put you in touch with the source.

This is the bible of the natural veterinarian - COMPLETE HERBAL HANDBOOK FOR FARM AND STABLE, Juliette de Bairacli Levy, Faber&Faber. This great classic herbal has been in print since 1951. The Ecologist, May 2001 has a profile of her.

Newman Turner got fantastic results in England, in the '40s and 50s, keeping disease at bay on his farm by establishing natural organic pastures. He also used my favourite drug extensively, garlic. He got so proficient at healing stock that he bought in animals with TB, Brucellosis and Johnes Disease, quarantined them, cured them and then introduced them to his herds. FERTILITY FARMING, F. Newman Turner, Faber & Faber, 1951. Also FERTILITY PASTURES AND COVER CROPS and HERDMANSHIP. Reprints of the books are available from the US at; http://home.earthlink.net/~brateaver/books/index.htm  See Roger Newan Turner's(FNT's son)  A Naturopath's Perspective

FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE  
I'm leaving this material on FMD here for the present, if only to remind us of the miserable events and the disastrous ways in which the UK gov dealt with the crisis.
Oh yeah! Next time, they now tell us, they will use vaccination. 
Read David Dimbleby's article on the Labour administration's procrastinations - A Dangerous Dither and the indefatigable Jonathan Miller who is not afraid to point the finger. 
Avoid apocalypse in Ireland 
FMD - a naturopath perspective - Roger Newman Turner
A mad cow, sheep and pig slaughter policy

28th February
Britain's farmers held their breath as new suspect cases were reported this week. Subsequent testing at Pirbright however proved negative.

January, 2002
Eleven months after the first case of the disease was found, Britain has been officially declared free of foot-and-mouth disease. Immensely relieved, the long-suffering farming community now sees new hope for the industry's future.
The outbreak has cost UK farming more than £2bn and the economy much more.
It will still be several weeks before restrictions on livestock farmers can be lifted - and perhaps months before Britain can trade fully with the rest of the world but the National Farmers' Union said the lifting of restrictions would remove a "long, dark shadow" from the countryside after 11 months of hell."

Foot-and-mouth facts
Confirmed cases: 2,030
Cattle slaughtered: 595,000
Sheep slaughtered: 3,306,000
Pigs slaughtered: 142,000
Other animals slaughtered: 4,000
Total animals slaughtered: 4,047,000
Countryside Agency puts cost to UK farming at up to £2.4bn
Cost to tourism estimated at between £2bn and £3bn

Many farmers are critical of the government's handling of the foot-and-mouth crisis and say far more should have been done to stop the disease spreading.   The cost to farming - leaving aside any damage to tourism - stands at more than £2bn.

1st January, 2002 

Hopes that Britain could be declared completely free of FMD were set back yesterday as anti-bodies to the disease were found in sheep in Northumberland. Over 2,000 animals are to be slaughtered.

30th November, 2001

Although no official cases being reported, Private Eye,15th - 29th November, says some contractores are busy removing bodies! www.private-eye.co.uk   

September. The Pits! New outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in Northumberland shock the farming industry. Eight cases in four days over the weekend prompts National Farmers Union spokesman, Malcolm Corbitt, to declare it " a disastrous scenario".  More on this and much else on FMD and related subjects on the BBC news site. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/in_depth/uk/2001/
foot_and_mouth/default.stm. Slaughtered animal tally heading for 4 million - almost ten times the total for the 1967 outbreak.                                                          

8th August 2001

Last week we heard about some huge compensation payments to farmers - The Compensation Millionaires - today we hear that there may have been collusion between the not-so-professional-valuers and farmers. www.rte.ie/morningireland

31st July 2001 

A £2,000.00 Lamb for the Slaughter. A Welsh farmer last week was offered a foot and mouth diseased animal for £2,000.00. The intention was that generous compensation could be claimed - compensation currently runs far ahead of market prices. Nuala Preston, Trefoil Stud, famous for her horses, but who also has cattle and sheep, turned down the telephone deal and contacted police and MAFF. She was "not impressed with MAFF's reaction" she said. It was not the first she'd heard of this practice and she felt sure that many desperate, practically bankrupt, farmers have given in to the temptation. The no. of FMD outbreaks in UK now approaches 2,000 . An even cursory glance at www.maff.gov.uk (afterwards type in, www.maff.co.uk for a fascinating surprise) shows that the number of daily outbreaks has not reduced since early May!

24th July 2001

Foot and mouth disease, though ignored, has not gone away. The current situation and especially the individual farmer's stories related in this Guardian article last week make grim reading. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4222873,00.html. Yet new minister of DEFRA, Margaret Beckett, says there will be no witch-hunt in the corridors of MAFF-power over the miserable slaughter and burn policy. Civil servants are after all sacred cows. (We put one in jail here in Ireland recently - a fairly unique story at the time - for attempting to embezzle millions - but on full salary!)

8th July 2001

www.independent.co.uk . It now appears that EU govts. are about to reject mass slaughter in future in favour of vaccination. Every argument against vaccination has now been dismissed. The recent experience of the Dutch with FMD has been the clincher. Documents from the now disbanded MAFF show that Britain was about to introduce vaccination during the recent outbreak but was blocked by farm leaders. Perhaps the farmers should be joint defendents with MAFF in any legal proceedings by the sectors suffering huge losses as a result of the fiasco.

See  Vegetarians' International Voice for Animals: www.viva.org.uk founder, Juliet Gellatley's article on FMD .

See the following BBC site for coverage of FMD in UK. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/in_depth/uk/2001/
foot_and_mouth/default.stm

and www.guardian.co.uk 

Hoof it lads - the poor mouth won't work - sell yourselves to Britain - indicates Irish Min.Tour.

May 29th. In Ireland, tourism unrecoverable losses from FMD restrictions are estimated at IP2 billion (£1.5 billion). The Min. Tour., Jim Mc Daid ( Cabinet country meeting in Killarney, 28th May)  however, under pressure to compensate in full, gave the industry IP2 million  today to  help it out. He argues that this figure (0.1% of losses) is "more effective than compensation"! and that it would be "a logical impossibility" to pay the whole cost (bank managers beware!). The 2 mill. is mostly to be spent on marketing in the UK.

Two suspected cases of FMD from Ireland were proved negative today. Our official score of outbreaks is still one -  in Co.Louth. Results from sheep samples from Donegal are awaited.  Not having such facilities ourselves, we also send our samples to Pirbright for analysis.

UK - Tues. May 29th The losses from FMD to tourism in the UK is estimated at £5 billion. It will be interesting to know the total cost - if it can ever be estimated - to the UK economy of "saving" farm exports worth just a few hundred million pounds. " An ill wind...." though - most of the IP2 million given to the Irish Tourist Board today for marketing will be spent on persuading the British to come to Ireland. You'll gain our punts; we gain your punters.

Total UK outbreaks are 1645 with 9 new cases last weekend. To add injury to injury the Army slaughtered 468 cattle in North Yorkshire mistakenly and 280 correctly, belonging to one farmer on different holdings. 

Lady Emma Tennant accused the Blair government of doctoring the FMD figures so that they are under-reported by perhaps up to 400%! She also challenged that the govt., against massive professional advice to vaccinate, gave in to Ben Gill, NFU and his Scottish colleague Jim Walker - in a letter to the Sunday Times, 27th May.

Food coupons are being distributed to some farmers in the UK by the Royal Scottish Agricultural Benevolent Society.

Why don't the UK and Irish tourism industries sue their governments for consequential losses etc? £7,000,000,000 is rather a big loss for one industry to shoulder on behalf of another and incompetence and political interference should surely be easy to prove. We suggest, to borrow Min. Jim's phrase, it is logically impossible not to seek compensation.

(Germans call FMD, "muzzle and claw disease" - Americans, more logically, call it, "hoof and mouth disease").

Tues. May 22nd. 

UK. There is a renewed outbreak of disease in the Yorkshire Dales where there have been 15 cases in the last ten days. Thousands of animals are being slaughtered. 

Ireland. In East Clare, 90 calves were slaughtered when, following an investigation, their origin could not be clarified. Samples are being tested.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,708-200635,00.html Fri. May 11th. UK army Brigadier blames farmers for deliberately spreading the disease. Over 500 cases of illegal animal movements detected in Cumbria alone as farmers move animals to avoid detection of fraud in headage payments and possibly to infect flocks.

www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/in_depth/uk/2001/
foot_and_mouth/default.st  Very comprehensive coverage of FMD -  and easily navigated.

www.sheepdrove.com. The site for Peter Kindersley's 2,500 acre organic farm in Berkshire. Mr Kindersley took out a legal challenge to the UK government's slaughter and burn policy. There is an article on the site relating to the history of FMD and others making the case for vaccination.

www.efrc.co.uk  Elm Farm Research Centre, home of organic research, has several articles favouring vaccination as a major part of control measures.

www.soilassociation.org Has been campaigning vigorously against current slaughter and burn  policies. 

www.guardian.co.uk  has extensive coverage and archive material of the FMD outbreak. Offers daily email up-dates.

www.maff.co.uk  Ministry of Agriculture, Fishery and Food.

www.dardni.gov.uk  Northern Ireland, Dept. Agriculture and Rural Development.

www.rte.ie/foot and mouth 

www.daff.irl.gov.ie  Irish Dept. Agriculture Fishery and Food and Rural Development.

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 A Mad, Cow, Sheep and Pig Slaughter Policy
Dear Sir
Lunacy rules! Animals slaughtered by the million, a countryside devastated, thousands of families traumatised, their lives and businesses in tatters, burning pyres, pits of rotting carcasses, armies of soldiers and white, contamination-suited veterinarians, blindly following orders from a monolithic Ministry - these are the nightmare scenes of the present FMD mess in the UK, likened in many media portrayals to biblical or medieval plagues. "Farmageddon" was one savagely witty epithet for it all. If last New Year, with some miracle of  foresight, you tried to foretell such events for 2001(or even 2084!) it would not be surprising if you ended up keeping a date with other men in white coats from another Ministry!
A once green and pleasant land now disease-blasted and shunned - a paragon of "high agriculture" now reduced to being the "leper of Europe" (Irish Ag. Minister, Mar. '01 - a Celtic kettle calling the Saxon pot black?) - Britain is burning itself at the stake in the economic interests of vested interests that have not been recalculated for today's very different market circumstances i.e all this for a morally dubious livestock export trade of relative economic insignificance!
If, in the end, one could feel confident that the catastrophe would  lead to some sanity in  agriculture and food policies  then it would perhaps be more bearable. However, signs of emerging sanity are not that evident, at least not within the UK government and its Ministry. Some weeks ago it seemed that the reasonable counsel of vaccination or part-vaccination, coming mostly from the organic sector but also with high-powered international veterinary support, would prevail. Mr Blair chose in the end to stick with the mad MAFF approach. The abominably wasteful, cruel,  slaughter and burn-or-bury policy continues. The rub is that this may be the last time a government on our planet is allowed to perpetrate such an atrocity on its people as modern vaccine control measures become increasingly successful and adopted.
The  irony  here is that a Labour government is risking its political future for the sake of a policy devised to protect the livestock-exporting interests of a 19th century landed aristocracy and in the process ignoring good science for the crude blunt instrument of slaughtering. Isn't ex-FOE, Jonathan Porritt in there somewhere advising?

Yours etc

Jim  O'Connor - widely published.

This letter was sent to me by the author, Roger Newman Turner, on 4th May, 2001. I hope shortly to have a full article on his father, the organic pioneer, Frank Newman Turner.

A naturopathic perspective  Whatever the wisdom or folly of slaughter, vaccination, or a combination of the two in managing the foot and mouth disease epidemic, very little has been said about the only satisfactory answer to this and other contagious diseases – the natural immunity of the host creature. It is naïve to believe that a virus sweeps the land malevolently destroying everything in its path. Microbes are opportunistic and flourish only where they do not encounter adequate resistance or find an environment conducive to their purposes.
It is widely believed that healthy, well-nourished cattle will develop a natural immunity to FMD, or recover without long-term harm. In this context it should be emphasised that ‘health’ is not synonymous with ‘hygiene’ or asepsis. The antibiotic-ridden cow is the antithesis of a healthy animal. It could even be argued that an obsession with sterility has weakened the immunity by removing natural challenges to inherent defence mechanisms.
It is high time this hypothesis was put to the test with properly conducted trials. It is not a new idea. Nearly fifty years ago, during the 1952 epidemic of FMD, my father, F. Newman Turner, invited the Ministry of Agriculture and the Animal Disease Research Centre at Pirbright to allow infected animals to mix freely with his herd of pedigree Jerseys. They had been reared organically, were never vaccinated, and were treated only with herbal medicines when the need arose.
He based this challenge on the experiences of Sir Albert Howard, who had conducted a similar experiment with his pedigree oxen in India in the nineteen-thirties. Sir Albert had allowed his naturally reared animals to rub noses with neighbouring herds infected with FMD. None of his animals contracted the disease.
F. Newman Turner’s challenge was ignored - Pirbright did not even acknowledge his letters - but at least, fifty years later, some people are acknowledging that FMD might partly be the consequence of the intensive farming practices about which he was warning people then.

Roger Newman Turner, BAc, ND, DO, 1, Harley Street, London.  www.naturomed.co.uk and www.healingonline.co.uk

April 2001
Avoid Apocalypse in Ireland
(This letter of mine, typical of many criticising the methods of dealing with FMD, was published widely in Ireland and the UK March/April '01).

Dear Sir
Like everybody else I am devastated to hear that we now have foot and mouth disease in the Republic.
But is it inevitable that we too should suffer the mediaeval-like, scenes of burning carcasses seen in Britain recently?
We all accept that in the case of serious threats to human health from BSE, TB and Brucellosis etc drastic measures are necessary.
But there is no human health risk with FMD. There doesn't seem to be a serious animal health one either (see websites below). There is just an economic one.
Are there figures to support this economic case?
There are, but they are from 1973 (I was involved in the preliminary work as a research student in Reading).
Those figures support the slaughter policy - as the cheapest method. However the report also said there were major " methodological problems" in arriving at the figures and " there was also the difficulty of quantifying factors such as the uncertainty and stress ...imposed on farmers." The implication was that if these human costs were factored in there would be no economic justification for the slaughter policy. Thus there would be no justification at all for it!
We urgently need an up-to-date cost/ benefit anaysis to base decisions on.
Despite the automatic put-downs to anyone suggesting it, vaccination is a possible alternative or supplemental method of controlling this disease. The whole context has changed politically, economicaly and scientifically since the slaughter policy was first adopted in the 19thC. But our spokespersons, Walsh, Dukes, Davern et al seem to be echoing the principles, paranoia and pride of a much-discredited MAFFF instead of giving us honest and complete information.
Vaccination was nearly adopted in the UK during the last outbreak. Holland is using vaccination this week. The US favours a mix of slaughter and vaccination. A report, Tues last, quotes a senior UK veterinary scientist saying that the slaughter and burn policy was "scientifically mistaken, economically suicidal, illegal and in anycase actually spreads the disease".
All I would urge is that we debate the issues quickly - but thoroughly - before we subject our hard-pressed rural community (and indeed the whole of our society) to an apocalypse that might in the end have been avoidable. ( www.sheepdrove.com  and www.organicts.com , 16th March, News, have information in depth on the above)

Sincerely   

Jim O'Connor

BSE and CJD

BSE/Mad Cow disease and nvCJD are well covered in these sites;
www.mad-cow.org Very large data base on BSE/nvCJD.
www.purefood.org has good information on BSE internationally, but especially in the US.
www.maff.gov.uk/animalh/bse/
www.bse.org.uk/  Official govt. site of the BSE Enquiry
www.bbc.co.uk Search for BSE - very large archive of articles.

Check organic farmer/scientist/activist Mark Purdey's site, www.markpurdey.com  for one alternative, well-researched theory on BSE. Originally he put forward a case for BSE being caused by the weakening effects on animals' neurological systems by the use of the organophosphate, Phosmet, in warble fly treatment. 

There are more than 175,000 sites about BSE on the Web.

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