The origin of the mad cow disease: India

The epidemic of mad cow disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) that struck Europe originated in the exports of animal feed and bones from South Asia that included human remains scavenged from the Ganges. British experts say that the crisis was initiated by bones and animal parts exported to Britain from the sub-continent from the 1950s to the 1970s, either as animal feed or as raw material for processing into feed and fertiliser. These exports included remains from partly-burned corpses that floated down the Ganges after Hindu funerals and which may have carried Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the cousin of mad cow disease). Billions of dollars have been spent in Europe to try to control BSE, a brain-destroying disease that was first spotted among British cattle in the late 1980s. The crisis has been amplified by the belief that BSE leapt the species barrier to humans. There have been 181 recorded cases of this fatal disorder, which has been named variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). The conventional view is that BSE began when British farmers used cattlefeed that contained the remains of ground-up cows or sheep that had been sick with the disease. This way, the prion was transmitted to cows and later infected humans who ate contaminated beef. But the new three related hypothesis suggests: (a) that BSE was acquired from a human TSE (prion disease); (b) that the route of infection was oral, through animal feed containing imported mammalian raw materials contaminated with human remains; and (c) that the origin was the Indian subcontinent, from which large amounts of mammalian material were imported during the relevant time period. Human remains are known to be incorporated into meal made locally, and may still be entering exported material. The report suggests that humans contaminated cows, rather than the other way round. And, it suggests, the source for the contamination originated decades ago, in partly-burned human corpses or remains that were scavenged from the Ganges and added to exports of animal meal and bones. However, further investigations are needed into the sources of animal by-products used in animal feed manufacture and into the transmissibility of human TSEs to cattle.