Mad cow disease traced to human remains in Ganges?

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Source: Vancouver Sun

 

Mad cow came from human remains

 

scientist: U.K. cattle likely fed the remains in bone meal imported from the Indian subcontinent, neurologist says

 

Nic Fleming

Daily Telegraph

 

September 2, 2005

 

LONDON -- The mad cow disease epidemic could have been caused by the feeding of material containing human remains to cattle, a scientist claimed Thursday.

 

Alan Colchester, a professor of neurology at the University of Kent, said the most likely origin of BSE and the subsequent deaths from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was the import from the Indian subcontinent of bone meal containing infected human remains.

 

Since the first case of BSE was reported in Britain in 1986, the original cause has remained unknown.

 

The most widely favoured candidate has been the transmission of sheep scrapie, a fatal degenerative disease that affects the nerve system, to cattle through feed.

 

The spontaneous mutation of a prion, a small protein found in the brain cell membrane, to create a new form of bovine transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) has also been suggested.

 

Writing in this week's issue of the Lancet, Colchester said neither of these theories had been proved and that he had amassed substantial circumstantial evidence to support his new hypothesis that BSE originated from an earlier human form of the disease.

 

He said: "The existing theories of the origin of BSE all have significant weaknesses, and so we set out to look for something more plausible, which I think we have found. We propose that human TSE-contaminated material was the cause of BSE, that this was transmitted orally via animal feed and that the infective material originated in the Indian subcontinent.

 

"Further investigations are needed into the sources of animal by-products used in animal feed manufacture, and into the transmittability of human TSEs to cattle." Britain imported substantial quantities of whole bones, crushed bones and carcass parts for use in the manufacture of fertilizers and animal feed during the 1960s and 1970s, with about half coming from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

 

Hindus believe that it is essential for their remains to be disposed of in a river, preferably the Ganges, and, while the ideal is for bodies to be burnt, often corpses are thrown in whole.

 

The collection of bones and carcasses has long been an important trade for peasants in India and Pakistan.

 

Media and eyewitness reports have described human remains being sold to processing mills along with animal material.

 

The Indian National CJD Registry recorded only 69 cases of CJD between 1968 and 1997, however, Colchester believes that there was substantial under-reporting.

 

The BSE epidemic peaked in 1992 in Britain with a total of more than 180,000 cases recorded. Variant CJD, the human form of BSE, has killed about 150 people since the first case was recorded in 1995.

 

Colchester questioned why BSE did not appear earlier given that scrapie has been endemic in Britain for at least 200 years, and that material from sheep has been fed to cattle for at least 70 years.

 

He also noted that all published attempts to transmit scrapie experimentally to cattle by the oral route have failed.