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Human Remains Link to BSE

Posted on: Friday, 2 September 2005, 06:00 CDT

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

A leading British expert on BSE believes there is strong evidence for linking the brain disease - which gave rise to variant 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 fertiliser 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 trade among peasants, who may not be selective about what kind of remains they pick up, says Prof Colchester. The theory suggests that "ordinary", or sporadic, Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease 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 beefburgers. In 1995 it re-emerged in a new form as "variant" or vCJD, a deadly and incurable brain disease.

The true origins of BSE are obscure. The conventional theory is that it first appeared as a result of sheep remains infected with a related disease, scrapie, being fed to cattle.

Feeding cows a "cannibal" diet - partly consisting of meal made from dead cattle - turned the disease into an epidemic which peaked in 1992 with more than 180,000 cases reported in the UK.

So far there have been 150 deaths definitely or probably caused by vCJD, with another seven suspected victims who are still alive.

Prof Colchester questions why BSE did not occur earlier than the 1990s, since meat and bone material containing sheep remains had been fed to cattle for up to 70 years. Scrapie has been endemic in Britain for at least 200 years.

He said it was "highly likely" that the mixing of human remains in meal exported from India and Pakistan had occurred since the late 1950s, and may still be continuing

Source: Birmingham Post; Birmingham (UK)

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