Did human remains cause mad cow disease?

From Wikinews, the free news source you can write!

Friday, September 2, 2005

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as BSE or "mad cow" disease, may have been caused by human remains ingested by British cattle, two scientists said today.

Alan Colchester and his daughter Nancy Colchester, from the University of Kent and University of Edinburgh, respectively, suggested that the remains of humans cast into the Ganges in an Indian funeral rite contaminated Indian animal feed that was imported to the U.K. If some of the humans died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, bone meal infected with CJD would have entered the British food chain, causing the similar BSE in cattle.

Admitting the evidence was not solid, the two scientists still argued that this new theory merited further review. The current theory of the origin of BSE involves the transmission of scrapie, a similar disease that affects sheep, to cattle. Prions, infectious proteins that would be the only disease-causing agents without nucleic acid, are thought to be the cause of all of these diseases.

Sources

• "Did Mad Cow Start in People?". Red Herring, September 2, 2005

• Emma Ross/Associated Press "Did mad cow disease come from human remains?". Chicago Sun-Times, September 2, 2005
  

Share this:

The text of this article has been released into the public domain. In the event that this is not legally possible, this article may be used for any purpose, without any condition, unless such conditions are required by law. This applies worldwide. Copyright terms on images, however, may vary, so please check individual image pages prior to duplication. Please note that this only applies to Wikinews content created prior to September 25, 2005. All content created after that date is released under a Creative Commons license which is mentioned at the bottom of each article.

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable. Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators. Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections. Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.