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Letter to: Rear Admiral Timothy Lawrence, Gloucestershire.
25 June 2007
Badgers, TB and Cattle
Dear Admiral
DEFRA and the NFU are dragging their feet over the use of high
technology to
solve this problem.
It is now known by those who are up to date in this field, that
mycobacterium tuberculosis is not the key factor in this problem,
but the
effect of maize when used for milk production.
Badgers love to eat maize.
The snag is that maize creates a deficiency of selenium and of
iodine, which
in turn decreases immunity to the germ which causes TB.
When cattle and badgers are both given adequate supplements of
these trace
elements, tuberculosis disappears. The cost of doing so, as compared
to the
cost of the TB crisis in cattle, would be negligible and also improve
the
health of the dairy cows.
There is a huge cultural lag between the discovery of these things
and their
application.
For example it took 200 years for the Admiralty to put limes on
British
ships, after a deficiency of vitamin C was discovered to be the
cause of
scurvy. It was a ship’s carpenter who eventually broke the
time barrier and
Britannia came to rule the waves. All other navies still had scurvy!
I have been told that you might help me break the time barrier causing
this
threat to our dairy industry. The one thing for you to bear in mind
is
this.
When I was a lad, tuberculosis in England was very common. Every
town had a sanatorium. Then quite mysteriously the illness disappeared,
without the medical profession playing any part in its disappearance.
We have learned a great deal since those days, but politicians have
not yet
taken on board, state of the art technology with trace elements.
Would you be willing to help me.
Doctor Edward C Hamlyn MBChB
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