A leading British expert on BSE believes that there is strong evidence, which links the brain disease. This gave rise to variant CJD in humans - to a grisly trade in carcass material that was prevalent in 1960s and 1970s.
 
According to Daily Mail, the mad cow disease might have originated from the human remains mixed into cattle feed. Britain imported hundreds of thousands of tons of ground-up animal parts for use as fertilizer and the manufacture of feed. Nearly half of this meat-and-bone meal came from the Indian sub-continent.
 
Professor Alan Colchester, from the University of Kent in Canterbury, argues that some of it almost certainly contained human as well as animal remains. The human material could be traced to corpses disposed of in rivers in accordance with Hindu funeral custom.

Collecting and selling bones and carcasses is a common local trade among peasants, who may not be too selective about what kind of remains they pick up, says Prof Colchester.

"The inclusion of human remains in material delivered to processing mills has been clearly described," he wrote in The Lancet medical journal in a paper co-authored by his daughter, Nancy Colchester, from the University of Edinburgh.

The theory suggests that "ordinary", or sporadic, Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease which arises naturally in humans was initially passed to cattle via feed contaminated with infected human tissue.

It emerged in the cow population as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE. Later, the infective agent was transmitted back to humans consuming meat products such as beef-burgers. In 1995 it re-emerged in a new form as "variant" or vCJD, a deadly and incurable brain disease.

The true origins of BSE are obscure. The conventional theory is that it first appeared as a result of sheep remains infected with a related disease, scrapie, being fed to cattle.

Prof Colchester questions why BSE did not occur earlier than the 1990s, since meat and bone material containing sheep remains had been fed to cattle for up to 70 years. Scrapie has been endemic in Britain for at least 200 years.

He said it was "highly likely" that the mixing of human remains in meal material exported from India and Pakistan had occurred since the late 1950s, and may still be continuing.

"In India and Pakistan, gathering large bones and carcasses from the land and from rivers has long been an important trade for peasants," he wrote.

"Collectors encounter considerable quantities of human as well as animal remains as a result of religious customs. Hindus believe that it is essential for their remains after death to 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 full cremation, and simply smoking the pelvis in women or the thorax in men has symbolic importance. Many complete corpses are thrown into the river."
However, it is a controversial view, the concerned people in India and Pakistan say that the allegation is wrong.

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