Mr. Michael Lambe:

I thank the committee for inviting me and I am sorry I could not attend in person. I want to take two or three minutes to flesh out a little of the history with Mr. Brennan's farm problem. I started attending the farm in 1996, when it could be clearly seen there were serious problems with ill thrift and production problems. On my first time on the farm, I thought there must have been some serious disease issues there. With Mr. Brennan's co-operation we engaged to try to improve animal health, husbandry, nutrition and general management of the farm. Over the next few years we certainly eliminated any disease issues that might have existed. We were happy we had done well. However, we were still left with these ill-thrift animals. We pushed on a bit further and said we had to look deeper. We looked at more of the mineral aspects and various things like that. Once again, any small problems were addressed, yet we were still looking at the same problem. I concluded, having used all of the veterinary medicines and investigations we had at hand, that there must be something else at work. I decided to invite the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, which at the time provided an on-farm investigation service, to join in with the investigation. I wrote to it and told the Department I had concluded that there must be some toxic agent at work. That was the beginning of Mr. Brennan's engagement with many third parties including the Department, the veterinary college and the EPA. There were also visits to Deputies and the petitions committee in Europe etc. One of early findings in the animals sent for post-mortem with the Department's initial investigation was that a lot of them had bone problems. Their bones were bendable. They almost had a bovine form of osteoporosis or osteomalacia, which was very unusual. I had not seen anything like that before in my life. That was all of the animals in Mr. Brennan's farm, just to give an indication. One of the days after we felt we had these healthy animals, but yet we had weanlings, which are six to eight-month-old animals weighing about 80 kg when they should be about 250 kg. They were about one third of the normal weight. It was like a ten-year-old who weighed three stone. It was quite remarkable. That was when we decided to engage other parties because it was something I had never seen before. We were obviously suspicious that a toxic agent was at work there. The reason I mentioned the bone problems in the laboratory is because human presentation of cadmium poisoning also affects bone and causes osteomalacia and bone change in humans. I thought that was quite a significant finding. I must also mention that Mr. Brennan became an excellent farmer who displayed top-end management skills and was compliant in everything that was asked of him. That is a teasing out of how this began and how we came to the conclusion.

We went through all the normal procedures and investigated all the normal things that occur on farms but they were not factors with Mr. Brennan's farm. He had healthy animals that just failed him production-wise. They were small in stature and did not grow. Cows produced just 50% of their normal milk yield. That is the clinical presentation of this problem.