Mark Purdey - Views of Purdey

Views of Purdey

His anti-establishment views, his doggedness, and his willingness to educate himself brought him some high-level contacts in the UK, including the Prince of Wales and Lord King, the former defence secretary, who regarded Purdey's work as a "classic piece of scientific investigation." It was King who, in April 1993, formally alerted the Ministry of Agriculture to Purdey's research, after Purdey forwarded King a letter from Professor Satoshi Ishikawa of Kitasato University, who wrote that Purdey's description "about Mad cows to organophosphates compounds and warble fly is exactly true."

Teresa Gorman, MP for Billericay and Ted Hughes, the poet laureate, were also supporters, while readers of The Guardian contributed to a fund to help pay for his research into BSE and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).

His legal victory attracted letters from farmers who believe that using OP compounds had caused them health problems. Purdey began to educate himself about the science of OPs just as the first recorded case of BSE was confirmed. He became convinced there was a connection, in part because cattle in Britain had been given unusually high doses of OPs; and in part because the theory that BSE was spread by contaminated meat and bone meal (MBM) did not, he argued, explain why the disease was not occurring in countries that had imported the same MBM from the UK.

The Telegraph writes that public support for Purdey increased after the BBC aired a documentary about his theory in 1988.