A new study published in the journal The Lancet suggests that the mad cow disease or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy may have originated from feeding cattle with a meal contaminated with traces of diseased human remains. The study further suggests that the infected feeds may have come the Asia and particularly from India, both cattle and human remains are hurled into the river Ganges as a part of the last rites.
Though little is known on the specific causes of the disease that has put to turmoil the beef and meat industry, Indian experts opine flaws in the new theory, suggesting the need to verify it scientifically. Belonging to a class of diseases known as the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), known to occur in goats, sheep and deer, it was only in 1986 that the disease was known to affect cows after the first cases were reported in Britain. In the 90’s it was understood that the disease could take the form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.
So far about 150 human deaths have been linked to the Mad Cow Disease, most of them reported from Britain. Ever since the biggest break out of the disease in the late 90s, some of the measures adopted to combat spread of the disease, included a ban on cattle feed containing cattle parts and norms for meatpackers to remove certain tissues more prone to carry the disease. There has been also a move to ban slaughtering of "downer" cattle for human food.
While scientists have been suggesting a link between the occurrence of the disease and the presence of malformed proteins or prions, there is a strong indication that vegetarian cattle when fed with meals containing contaminated meat developed the disease into a bovine form. The new study by a pair of Britons proposes that BSE may owe its origins to the tonnes of bone meal Britain imported from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan in the 60’s to feed its cattle, which possibly were contaminated with human bones.
Supporting his claim Alan Colchester, a professor at the University of Kent who led the study suggest, "In India and Pakistan, gathering large bones and carcasses from the land and from rivers has long been an important local trade for peasants", saying that there existed documentary evidence of the inclusion of human remains in the bone meals exported. The scientists also suggest that the close similarities between the human form and bovine form of the diseases extend support to their theory.
Strangely, all the cases of the mad cow disease have largely been reported in Europe and some parts of America, with hardly any such suspect cases reported in the parts of Asia that supposedly “originated” the disease, calling to question the validity of the new theory.
Meanwhile the new theory puts some food for thought for scientists and researchers to mull on, even as they look for clues into the somehwat enigmatic disease that emerged in the 80s, nearly twenty years after the “infected” consignments of cattle meal were received. Some long incubation for a disease that attacks the brain very swiftly.
