THE search for the original cause of mad cow disease just took a gruesome turn.
Rather than originating in British cattle in the 1980s, or in an exotic animal ground up and fed to them, the prion disease may have come from dead people.
Alan Colchester and Nancy Colchester at the universities of Kent and Edinburgh in the UK suggest that British cattle could have caught BSE after eating the remains of people who died of the related human prion disease CJD. The team has discovered that the UK imported hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carcass scraps in the…
