The Writings of Revilo P Oliver 1908-1994

VIRAL PROGRESS

by Professor Revilo P. Oliver (Liberty Bell, December 1988)




AN ITEM tucked into a lower corner of the first page of a recent issue of the Cape Times (Cape Town, South Africa) is a despatch from the newspaper's correspondent in London, who reports a potentially disastrous development that the British press appears to have virtually suppressed, since it has not been noticed by my sources in Britain.

There is taking place, among cattle "all over the United Kingdom," a sudden outbreak of a deadly epizoötic that has been called "Bovine spongiform encephalopathy." The disease is caused by a virus which simply eats up the brains of the animals and "can turn docile cows into raging beasts" before they die. The virus has been found in the brains of 421 cows, and the laboratory "has been literally flooded" with similarly eroded brains that have yet to be examined.

The despatch reports that the disease, and hence the virus that causes it, correspond to the disease called Kuru, which similarly destroys human brains, on which I commented in Liberty Bell, December 1983, where I remarked on the great similarity between that disease and the African Plague (incorrectly called "AIDS"). Both sometimes remain dormant in the bodies of infected and therefore doomed persons for as long as ten years, possibly fifteen, and the African Plague sometimes attacks the brain, as does Kuru, although it more commonly destroys the Immune System and so produces death from any of a wide variety of diseases.

What the despatch does not report is the close correspondence of Kuru to the ovine encephalopathy vulgarly called "scrapie." It is highly probable that the new disease among British cattle is simply the bovine adaptation of "scrapie." One can understand why that obvious similarity was not noticed. As I pointed out in Liberty Bell, the bitter experience of several European nations had shown that the rapid spread of "scrapie" could be prevented only by destroying all sheep that could have come near a diseased animal or could have grazed in pastures in which there had been a diseased or potentially diseased sheep. That would have suggested that the bovine epizoötic in Britain can be controlled only by wholesale slaughter of cattle in all parts of the British Isles.

According to the despatch, "agricultural officials are anxious to avoid panic in the meat industry," which would be bad for business.

No one knows whether the virus can be communicated to human beings who consume the milk or beef of infected cattle. The Professor of Zoölogy at Oxford thinks it "unlikely" that the human beings will be infected by the milk, but maintains a prudent silence about the beef, which, it seems, has thus far been placed on the market and sold to the public. It will be interesting to see what effect that beef will have on those who eat it -- if the facts are not kept secret.

The outbreak of the apparently new infection in Britain will suggest questions to every reader. One unexplained item in the press report is the statement that most of the bovine brains thus far examined came from the breed that is called Holstein. Is this a coincidence, or can it be that, as is theoretically possible, genetically different breeds of cattle have differing powers of resistance to the virus?

Is the virus a sudden product of mutation or, as Christians would say, was specially created by sadistic old Yahweh? The ovine disease called "scrapie" has presumably been extinct in the British Isles for many years, but did particles of the virus remain dormant until some chance permitted them to infect a cow?

Study of the African Plague has shown that the virus that causes the disease has extraordinary powers of adapting itself to new conditions and victims by mutation. Did some one of the perverts who are the darlings of British clergymen and "intellectuals," or some piece of the anthropoid garbage the English are charitably importing to supplant their own children, bite a cow? (1)
 
 

(1. There is, of course, the question of natural immunity, of which the limits are still undefined. The virus that causes the African Plague has been found in at least one species of African monkey, to which it is harmless. The widely believed myth about the origin of syphilis is the very converse of the truth: syphilitic Indians do not infect the female llamas with which they copulate. But there is no fixed boundary between human beings and other species of animals. It is known, for example, that some diseases of cats are communicated to children who play with infected animals, and examples of such transmissibility could be multiplied.)

 

 

ADDENDUM

Since the foregoing was ready for the press, the New Scientist for 11 August 1988 has come to hand. It contains an article that makes it clear that 1) the new epizoötic destroys all breeds of cattle (Ayrshires, Shorthorns, Guernseys, etc., as well as Holsteins); 2) the relation of the disease to "scrapie" is now well known, and some believe it is simply the ovine disease become bovine; and 3) the British government is now enforcing the slaughtering of all infected cattle and burning of their carcasses. (2)
 
 

(2. There is also an attempt, odd in a strictly scientific journal, to minimize the gravity of the disease by reporting that "scrapie" is still common in England, but alert shepherds recognize the very first symptoms of the disease and have the infected animal butchered at once and its flesh sold to the public. Nevertheless, we are told, no human beings were infected by the infected mutton. That is obviously a bluff. The author cannot know that. What physician would have traced insanity or death to an infection that might have occurred months or years or a decade earlier and of which the patient would have no recollection? He would naturally report the fatality as the result of the disease familiar to him which most nearly approximated the victim's symptoms.)

 


This article originally appeared in Liberty Bell magazine, published monthly by George P. Dietz from September 1973 to February 1999. For reprint information please write to Liberty Bell Publications, Post Office Box 21, Reedy WV 25270 USA.

Copyright ©2001 Kevin Alfred Strom.  Back to Revilo P. Oliver Index