IT WAS cows dining on the ground-up remains of other cows that started the
BSE epidemic. But where did the disease actually come from?
For years the mainstream theory was that some of the meat and bonemeal (MBM)
eaten by British cows must have been infected with an unusual form of the sheep
disease scrapie. But this didn’t explain why BSE hit Britain in the 1980s:
scrapie was common elsewhere and cattle round the world had been eating MBM for
decades, apparently with no ill effects. So when last year’s BSE inquiry backed
a rival theory suggesting the disease was…
