An underground, eco-detective journey into the origins of spongiform disease.

by Mark Purdey, 

The White Sands Missile Range is an extensive spread of US military controlled cacti country that spans the southernmost extremes of the San Andres mountain ridge. There is an eerie atmosphere to the place.

A Department of Natural Resources truck kicks up the dust across the droughted canyon, its engines reverberating in an agitated mode. It stops at the main entrance gates along the perimeter fence. One of the wildlife officers gets out and walks to security, seemingly oblivious to the distant thump of a missile exploding across the range. He is clearly preoccupied with the more important task of slaughtering animals who have succumbed to this so called "hyper-infectious" disease. The truck is soon on its way, loosing itself within the thousands of acres of parched up military compound.

This latest epidemiological aberration delivers a serious challenge to the viability of the conventional consensus on the origins of CWD. It has rumbled the cornerstones of institutionalized ‘expertise’, bringing into question those veterinarians who have plumped for the assumption that some unconventional "hyper-infectious" agent is spreading via body to body contact through the deer populations.

So how did the ‘infectious agent’ jump the 500 mile gap between the long standing CWD hotspot zone in Colorado and the CWD-free deer residing within the White Sands Missile Range? The ‘experts’ were baffled. But, true to form, this latest challenge to the official theory was conveniently obfuscated into oblivion; outcast as some illusory mirage that just happened one day in the New Mexico desert.

But the answer is only evident to those who care to scratch a bit deeper than the dust. For they cannot help but notice some overt environmental features that exclusively predominate this unique location. Factors which are invariably shared by every single TSE cluster location around the world;

Before the military came, White Sands was an industrious centre for the mining of the manganese oxide and wulfenite ores (NB; wulfenite contains the copper chelating molybdenum metal). The museum quality black crystals lay scattered across the topof the terrain, twinkling out a kind of sombre resonance under the desert sun. They emanate the haunted history of the place.

And since the military have occupied the range, the US authorities have been actively engaged in monitoring the unique intensity of infrasonic shock bursts that are radiated by the explosions of their own missiles. The poor deer herd has played guinea pig to an unwitting experiment that has cracked the causal riddle of spongiform disease.

Since 1986, the infamous novel neuro-degenerative syndrome, BSE and vCJD , has insidiously blighted the heartbeat of British rural life. The disease has annihilated thousands of cattle and a growing number of young people, as well as creating a fierce battleground between nations, vested interests, political parties, farmers, victim support groups and consumers. More recently, the shock waves of the BSE debacle have ricocheted around the entire world.

But despite the severity of the mad cow legacy, little genuine attempt has been made to crack the causal riddle of these diseases; thereby leaving us devoid of insight into measures that would best cure, control and better still, prevent this disease.

But this story shines a ray of light over the whole debacle. It charters my own eco-detective escapades and original field investigations which ran in tandem with the laboratory quest of Cambridge University biochemist, Dr David Brown. These combined works have gone some way towards unearthing the truth underpinning the original cause of these grotesque diseases

Hard scientific evidence has been amassed which indicates that vCJD and BSE could both result from separate exposure of bovines and humans to the same package of toxic environmental factors – ferri-magnetic metals and low frequency sonic shock - and not from the ingestion of the one species by the other. If such a polemic hypothesis continues to accumulate momentum, a radical upheaval of the status quo mindset can be expected.

But despite the conclusions of several field and laboratory studies providing strong support for the environmental hypothesis, the resulting publications have been dismissed by the UK government. Furthermore, contrary to the positive recommendations made in the 1999 BSE Inquiry and EU Commission BSE reports in respect of funding research into this theory, the irrational rejection of grant proposals by the UK government continues to the present day - including one submission aimed at developing a feasible cure for vCJD!