Animal feed contaminated with human remains from the Indian subcontinent may have caused the first cases of mad cow disease, according to Alan Colchester, professor of clinical neuroscience at the University of Kent, and his daughter Nancy Colchester, a medical researcher at Edinburgh University.

Intensive scientific investigation has failed to discover the source of the infectious “prions” in cattle feed which are believed to have started the BSE epidemic, particularly in Britain where 180,000 cases have been recorded. The conventional view is that they came either from scrapie from sheep or from a previously unknown brain disease that arose spontaneously in cattle and was amplified by the inclusion of cattle remains fed back to the same species.