Alan Colchester of the University of Kent and his daughter Nancy Colchester, of the University of Edinburgh have been researching the origins of mad cow disease. It is generally accepted that it arose from the practice that developed of feeding ground up bones and other animal material to cows but Alan and Nancy have taken their investigations to a whole new and unsettling level.

During the 1960s and 1970s Britain imported hundreds of thousands of tonnes of whole and crushed bones and animal carcasses that were processed with other material more natural to a cow's diet to produce fodder. Nearly 50% of these imports came from Bangladesh, where peasants gathering animal materials may have also picked up human remains. Yep you read that correctly, human body parts were being imported amongst other animal material that was ultimately fed to the cows.

The currently accepted theory is that mad cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, arose from the injestion of material from sheep with a disease called sheep scrapie. However cows have been exposed to this disease for over 70 years and BSE is only a relative recent disease. More likely argue the Colchesters is recent exposure to human remains carrying sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), thought to arise spontaneously in people.

This theory is supported by an examination of religious customs in Bangladesh and surrounding areas which result in many corpses being disposed of in rivers. Foraging for animal carcasses in rivers by peasants for this export trade is the likely source for these human remains.

Fancy a steak for dinner tonight?