For the last eight years, I’ve not only been searching for the origins
of all these animal-human disease outbreaks, but also the method of
spread.

Whilst there was never going to be an “answer to everything” in one
nice string wrapped package, there had to be an over-riding source for
a sudden global increase.

Although “it was always there, we just did not notice” school of
thought is attractively English and allied to the “let’s not panic”
school of thought – it did not ring true.

It seemed clear that the nose to the grindstone school of science is
not given to seeking out or finding universal truths; neither are the
“lets do some PR and get a grant” likely to produce any results.

Oddly the obvious “I love appearing on TV” might just come up with
something, if they stopped looking in a mirror for five minutes. They
do at least have the virtue of trying to explain the work of others to
the general public to force them to generalise.

And it is the subtle art of generalisation that brings the big
insights.

Catching Britain’s bent vets faking it up and spotting the subsequent
bushmeat fabrication was the spur for me. 

It did not take long to work out that it was Britain’s obsession with
breeding, and the resultant import and export of live animals, that
made Britain the fulcrum for the maelstrom of zoonotic disease
enveloping the world.

It was the American obsession with the economies of scale, and the
equally American fight back of the small farmers, that kept coming
onto the scene. 

They were worried about the scale of some of their intensive animal
farms and the lagoons of slurry. American science was telling us that
antibiotic resistant strains of disease were spreading long distances
in ground water

They were also getting outbreaks of disease connected to packaged food
– especially things like salads and peppers. The pathogens seemed to
come from animals but there was no really obvious mechanism of
transfer.

Yesterday, I was talking about Scottish vets taking the PSIS and
E,Coli traced to the water supply very near to where Pennington’s
Conference is meeting.

It’s in the bloody water, in’it!

Larger farms, more antibiotic use and the private water supplies,
coexist in pig and poultry country: often almost universal for
intensive farms and packing plants.

This seems to be the common factor in many cases.

We know that contraceptive chemicals persist in the public water
supply. 

Private supplies are liable to a very different cocktail. For years I
lived and had a private borehole less than two hundred yards from a
traditional pig farm.

So the news this morning, from Aberdeen, that we have an animal
derived bug that has developed the characteristic of clinging to
lettuce and can travel in water figures.

It goes a long way to explaining many outbreaks.

I have checked - outbreaks currently in Britain, Ireland, the US and
elsewhere of E,Coli are usually in pig/poultry areas and the water
supply, sometimes public sometimes private, is often implicated.

Does this let the vets off the hook? 

No. 

Had they admitted the use of antibiotics in vast quantities to deal
with mutated PMWS in pigs, a lot of people would have been on the case
much earlier. Human lives would have been saved.

It Britain’s veterinary industry refuses to reform, it has to have
reform forced on it. 

If necessary foreign intervention should be encouraged and the full
force of domestic criminal and international law engaged.

-- 
Regards
Pat Gardiner
Release the results of testing British pigs for MRSA and C.Diff now!
www.go-self-sufficient.com  and http://animal-epidemics.blogspot.com/