According to British scientists, Mad Cow disease may have originated from animal feed contaminated with human remains washed ashore after being floated down river in Indian funerals.
At present the cause of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), which infected an estimated 2 million cattle during an epidemic in Britain, is unknown, but it is thought to have resulted from cattle being fed material containing the remains of sheep infected with scrapie.
Professor Alan Colchester of the University of Kent in England says he believes it may have been caused by the tonnes of animal bones and other tissue imported from India for animal feed, which also may have contained the remains of humans infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).
All three diseases, Scrapie, BSE and CJD are illnesses caused by brain proteins that transform themselves into infectious agents.
Professor Colchester says he is not convinced by existing theories of the original causes of BSE, the bovine disease.
He says they have identified the fact that a large amount of imported animal feeding material was brought into Britain during the period when BSE must first have occurred and the largest source coming to the UK was from the Indian subcontinent.
Professor Colchester and his daughter Nancy, of the University of Edinburgh, say that many human and animal corpses were disposed of in rivers in India in accordance with Hindu custom, and the remains subsequently washed ashore in poor areas where bone collectors work.
He says they know that there is a considerable risk of the incorporation of human remains with the animal remains that are collected and are processed locally, and some have been exported.
He has found that over 10 years, more than a third of a million tonnes of material from these areas was imported into the UK.
The scientists believe the contaminated feed led to BSE, as humans acquired variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) from eating meat from infected cattle.