MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Possible “human origin” of BSE

Mad cow disease may have originated from human remains mixed into cattle feed, according to a controversial new theory.

A leading British expert on Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis believes there is strong evidence for linking the brain disease - which gave rise to variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease, CJD, in humans - to a grisly trade in carcass material that was prevalent in the 1960s and '70s.

Over those decades Britain imported hundreds of thousands of tons of ground-up animal parts for use as fertilizer and the manufacture of feed. Nearly half this meat-and-bone meal came from the Indian sub-continent.

Professor Alan Colchester, from the University of Kent in Canterbury, argues that some of it almost certainly contained human as well as animal remains. The human material could be traced to corpses disposed of in rivers in accordance with Hindu funeral custom.

Collecting and selling bones and carcasses is a common local trade among peasants, who may not be too selective about what kind of remains they pick up, says Prof Colchester.

"The inclusion of human remains in material delivered to processing mills has been clearly described" he wrote in The Lancet medical journal in a paper co-authored by his daughter, Nancy Colchester, from the University of Edinburgh.

The theory suggests that "ordinary", or sporadic, CJD which arises naturally in humans was initially passed to cattle via feed contaminated with infected human tissue.

It emerged in the cow population as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE. Later, the infective agent was transmitted back to humans consuming meat products such as beef-burgers. In 1995 it re-emerged in a new form as "variant" or vCJD, a deadly and incurable brain disease.