Human remains linked to vCJD

Mad cow disease and its human equivalent, vCJD, could have been caused by cattle feed becoming contaminated by human remains, a new theory has claimed.

The report suggested that animal bone meal, imported from India to the UK, could have become contaminated by corpses that had been disposed of in rivers in accordance with Hindu funeral customs.

The controversial report, by Professor Alan Colchester at the University of Kent and his daughter Nancy, a veterinary medicine specialist at the University of Edinburgh, was published in ‘The Lancet’.

The authors admit that their evidence is circumstantial, but says it is enough to warrant further research. However, the claims have been described as “speculative” by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and criticised by Indian scientists.

The report suggested that Hindu funerals practices, which require that bodies be disposed of in a river, may be to blame for the contamination. Although the corpses are supposed to be burnt, many families in India and Pakistan cannot afford this. The authors said that, sometimes, complete corpses were thrown into rivers such as the Ganges.

The authors said that some of the corpses could have been infected with Creutzfeldt Jakob disease and the infection could have been passed through the bones and carcass parts collected by locals to make bone meal for exportation.

Britain imported tonnes of bone meal, much of which was from India and Pakistan, in the 1960s and 1970s. The authors said that the contaminated bone meal might have been the source for the emergence of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in cattle, which led to the deadly variant strain of CJD in humans, when they ate the contaminated meat.

Indian scientists have been sceptical about the claims, pointing out that there has not been a BSE epidemic in India. Susarla Shankar and Parthasarathy Satischandra of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore, said: “Scientists must proceed cautiously when hypothesising about a disease that has such wide geographic, cultural and religious implications.”

The favoured theory regarding the origins of BSE is that sheep remains, infected with scrapie, were fed to cattle.

(KMcA/SP)