This is really disturbing ...
FROM:
Mad Cow May Have Come From Humans (click) The hypothesis, outlined this week in The Lancet medical journal, suggests the infected cattle feed came from the Indian subcontinent, where bodies sometimes are ceremonially thrown into the Ganges River.
The cause of the original case or cases of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is unknown, but it belongs to a class of illnesses called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs.
Such illnesses exist in several species. Scrapie is a TSE that affects sheep and goats, while chronic wasting disease afflicts elk and deer. A handful of TSEs are found in humans, including Kuru, Alper's disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD.
... the similarities between the strains - mad cow disease, classical CJD and variant CJD - are sufficiently close to support the theory of a link among them, the authors argued.
"In India and Pakistan, gathering large bones and carcasses from the land and from rivers has long been an important local trade for peasants," the scientists wrote. "Collectors encounter considerable quantities of human as well as animal remains as a result of religious customs."
Hindus believe remains should be disposed of in a river, preferably the Ganges.
"The ideal is for the body to be burned, but most people cannot afford enough wood for a full cremation. ... Many complete corpses are thrown into the river," the scientists said, adding that the inclusion of human remains in animal bone material exported from the Indian subcontinent has been documented.
How do you want that hamburger ... rare?
Seriously, I do not like the news of surreptitious surrogate cannibalism, regardless of the results of this theory.
Is there any way to innoculate or otherwise protect people from this disease once it is in the population?
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