Who ate whom? Did feeding human remains to cattle start mad-cow?
HELEN BRANSWELL TORONTO A leading medical journal has published a disturbing theory about the possible origins of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, suggesting that mad-cow disease may have developed because human remains were fed to British cattle in the 1960s and 1970s. Canada’s leading expert on transmissible spongiform encephalopathies says the unsettling hypothesis presented this week in The Lancet might be accurate. “All I can say at this point is it’s plausible. It’s not out to lunch,” Dr. Neil Cashman said from Vancouver, where he teaches in the department of neurology at the University of British Columbia. “But it’s also not clear whether this hypothesis is true, or even if this hypothesis can be tested.” It had previously been thought the brain-wasting disease passed to cattle through remains of sheep infected with scrapie (the sheep equivalent of BSE) that were added to cattle feed. The theory continued that humans who ate infected beef developed a human form of BSE. It becam
