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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