“There’s been a lot of controversy over it. Basically, some doctors have been skeptical that it exists, yet people keep coming down with the symptoms.” He shrugged. “The letters stand for myalgic encephalomyelitis.”
“I can see why it’s called ME. The E in BSE stands for something similar.”
“Encephalopathy. Encephalon just means the brain, from the Greek enkephalos, meaning ”within the head.“ I learned that a few years ago.” He stared out over the fields. “I’ve learned a lot these past few years.” He looked back at the farm. “This place is or-ganic. Do you know how BSE is supposed to have started?”
“I read something in Jim’s notes about animal feed.”
Vincent nodded. “MAFF-that’s the Ministry of Agriculture-relaxed their rules in the 1980s, allowing the rendering industry to take a few shortcuts. Don’t ask me why it happened or who was responsible, but it happened. They removed two processes, saving time and money. One was a solvent extraction, the other a steam-heat treatment. You see, the rendering industry was rendering down sheep and cows to feed to other cows. Bits of meat and bone were going into the feed cake.”
“Right.” Reeve buttoned up his jacket, still damp from a dash through the rain to catch the train. The evening was growing chilly.
“Because those two processes had been removed, prions got into the feed cake. Prion protein is sometimes called PrP.”
“I saw it in the notes, I think.”
“It causes scrapie in sheep.” Vincent raised a finger. “Remember, this is the accepted story I’m giving you. So the feed cake was infected, and the cows were being given the bovine form of sheep scrapie, which is BSE.” He paused, then smiled. “You’re wondering what all this has to do with Spanish cook-ing oil.”
Reeve nodded.
Vincent started to walk, following the wall along the back of the milking shed. “Well, the Spanish blamed contaminated cooking oil and left it at that. Only, some of the victims had never touched the oil.”
“And some of the cows who hadn’t eaten the infected feed still caught BSE?”
Vincent shook his head. “Oh, no, the point is this: some farms-organic farms-who had used the so-called infected feed didn’t catch the disease at all.”
“Hang on a second…”
“I know what you’re thinking. But organic farms are allowed to buy in twenty percent conventional feed.”
“So you’re saying BSE had nothing to do with feed cake, infected or otherwise?”
Vincent smiled without humor. “Why use the past tense? BSE is still with us. The ”infected‘ feed cake was banned on the eighteenth of July 1988.“ He pointed into the distance. ”I can show you calves less than six months old who have BSE. Vets from MAFF call them BABs: Born After the Ban. There’ve been more than ten thousand of them. To date, nearly a hundred and fifty thousand cows have died in the UK from BSE.“
They had come back to the farmyard. Vincent opened the Subaru. “Get in,” he said. Reeve got in. Vincent kept telling his story as he drove.
“I mentioned ME a little while back. When it first came to be noticed, it was supposed to have its roots in everyday stress. They called it Yuppie Flu. It isn’t called that nowadays. Now we call it Farmers’ Flu. That’s because so many farmers show symptoms. There’s a man-used to be a farmer, now he’s more of a campaigner, though he still tries to farm when they let him-who’s trying to discover why there’s an increase in the occurrence of neurological diseases like ME, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s.”
“What do you mean, ”when they let him‘?“
“He’s been threatened,” Vincent said simply. “People helping him have died. Car crashes, unexplained deaths, accidents…” He turned to Reeve. “Only four or five, you understand. Not yet an epidemic.”
They were winding down country lanes barely the width of two cars. The sun had gone down.
Vincent put the heater on. “It may just be coincidence,” he said, “that BSE started to appear around the same time that MAFF was telling farmers to protect against warble fly in their cattle by rubbing on an organophosphorus treatment. What some of us would like to know is whether OPs can cause prions to mutate.”
“So these OP chemicals are to blame?”
“Nobody knows. It sometimes seems to me hardly anybody wants to know. I mean, imagine the embarrassment if it turned out a government directive had started the whole thing off. Imagine the claims for compensation that would be put in by the farmers suffering from OP poisoning. Imagine the cost to the agrichemical industry if they had to withdraw products, carry out expensive tests… maybe even pay compensation. We’re talking about a worldwide industry. The whole farming world is hooked on pesticides of one kind or another. And on the other side of the coin, if pesticides had to be withdrawn, and new ones created and tested, there’d be a gap of years-and in those years yields would decrease, pests would multiply, farms would go out of business, the cost of every foodstuff in the supermarket would rocket. You can see where that would lead: economic disaster.” He looked at Reeve again. “Maybe they’re right to try and stop us. What are a few lives when measured against an economic disaster of those proportions?”
Reeve shivered, digging deeper into his coat. He felt exhausted, lack of sleep and jet lag hitting him hard. “Who’s trying to stop you?”
“Could be any or all of them.”
“CWC?”
“Co-World Chemicals has a lot to lose. Its worldwide market share is worth billions of dollars annually. They’ve also got a very persuasive lobby which keeps the majority of farmers and governments on their side. Sweetened, as you might say.”
Reeve nodded, getting his meaning. “So there’s a cover-up going on.”
“To my mind undoubtedly, but then I would say that. I was suddenly fired from my job, a job I thought I was good at. When I began to be persuaded that the feed-cake explanation just wasn’t on, I spoke twice about it in public, sent out a single press release-and next thing I knew my job was being ”phased out.“”
“I thought the National Farmers’ Union was supposed to be on the side of farmers.”
“It is on the side of farmers-or at least, it’s on the side of the majority of them, the ones with their heads in the sand.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re nearly there.”
Reeve had half-thought he was going to be returned to the railroad station, meeting over. But, if anything, the landscape had grown less populous. They turned up a track and arrived at a high mesh gate topped with razor wire. A fence of similar height, similarly protected, stretched off either side. There were warning notices on the gate, picked out by the 4x4’s headlights, but nothing to say what the fence and razor wire were protecting.
When Reeve followed Vincent out of the Subaru, a smell hit the back of his throat and he nearly gagged. It lay heavy in the air; the smell of dead flesh.
“We have to walk around the perimeter to get a good look,” Vincent said. He turned on his flashlight. “It’s a good job of invisible landscaping. You’d really have to be keen before you got to see what’s inside.”
“There’s something I might as well ask you,” Reeve said. “God knows I’ve asked everyone else. Does the word Agrippa mean anything?”
“Of course,” Vincent said casually. “It’s a small R and D company, American-based.”
“My brother had the word written on a scrap of paper.”
“Maybe he was looking into Agrippa. The company is at the forefront of genetic mutation.”
“Meaning what exactly?” Reeve recalled something Fliss Hornby had said: Jim had been reading up on genetic patents.
“Meaning they take something and alter its genetic code, to try to make a better product. ”Better‘ being their description, not mine.“