2/9/05 BSE origins in bone collection from Indian rivers.
A theory by Prof Colchester published in the Lancet this week has surprisingly been given a major outing by the media.
Although laudably admitting there are obvious flaws in the 'other' theory Prof Colchester argues that the cause of BSE/vCJD lies in the human bones floated down rivers in India as part of Hindu funeral rites. These bones are salvaged from the rivers by poor Indian people who then may sell them on to animal feed companies.
Consider the following : One might expect there to be about 200 victims of sporadic cjd throughout all India in a year, a tiny fraction of the 100s of thousands who would die of all other causes .
What is the likelihood of any of these allegedly 'infected' bones from 200 victims reaching the animal food chain.
Even if such bones did reach a feed mill the tiny quantity of human cjd prion material from such few bones would produce an infinitessimal dose after it is bulked up with all the other other 'non infective' material that makes up the feed - virtually into homeopathic doses here.
There has never been a case of BSE or vCJD in India .
Strangely back in the 1980s the 'incriminated' meat and bonemeal that was exported abroad widely and supposedly caused BSE in the UK in epidemic proportions was not causing BSE in countries to which it was exported.
All experiments to transmit TSEs by food products like meat and bone meal or beefburgers have failed.
In this theory sporadic cjd has to cross the species barrier and cause BSE, a disease that resembles variant CJD not sporadic cjd.
Also remember that 18-20 years ago when British beef was highest in bse prion it was consumed by perhaps 50 million people in this country and also probably millions abroad, through both export (processed foods )and visits to the UK. Why, if eating this beef causes vCJD, have we (thankfully) only had about 160 cases of vCJD over twenty years and why is the incidence going down.
Boring, fanciful nonsense.

Comment by Mark.

I was appalled to see such sensationalist mass media hype and scare-mongering - the world drifts further from the truth about the origins of BSE. This time, it centres upon the same old scientific clique and how their tale of a few odd human bones from the Indian outback had leaked into UK cattle feed, thereby causing BSE. Yet, there is no scientific data to support this – let alone common sense. The once astute BBC science reporter, Susan Watts, who has launched this latest scandal, should be ashamed of herself.

At the centre of the latest BSE melodrama is Dr Alan Colchester, renowned for his earlier attempts to pin the cluster of five cases of vCJD in the Kent countryside on a supply of drinking water that had allegedly become contaminated by waste water from a meat rendering factory. But you would have thought that this expert would have been instantly discredited on the basis that only one of the five vCJD cases involved in this cluster had actually lived in this water catchment area and therefore been drinking water from the particular supply involved . Furthermore the whole assertion of water contamination by this rendering plant has never been substantiated .

On the BBC Newsnight piece last night, Prof John Collinge was the only contributor to make a sensible comment on this latest fracas. How could BSE have been transmitted from India through feed when there have never been any cases of new strain TSE recorded on the Indian continent ?

Even more mysterious was the fact that nobody has picked up on the true relevance of the other press release put out by Texas Uni last week - that the use of sound waves on living tissues will determine whether a person's prion protein is primed for BSE or not. Although widely aired on the BBC news, nobody had connected this lab observation to my 4x published field research studies carried out in every cluster zone of TSE across the world - which concluded that exposures to sonic shock waves will activate the metal microcrystallised piezoelectic prion contaminants in mammalian brain, unleashing a deadly cascade of electric shocks which literally burn out the so called spongiform holes in the brain. This is founded upon the elementary laws of physics and the properties of piezoelectric materials .

The fact that every cluster of TSE in the world is located around sites where piezoelectric microcrystal contaminants { used as detonators } have leaked as a result of various local activities involving military munitions should not be ignored . Since TSE clusters and Munition sites are both rare phenomena, then the persistent occurrence of these two phenomena in the precise same region has got to offer more than a mere coincidence. Furthermore, These microcrystals are heat resistant, transmissible and will produce a progressive pathogenesis once implanted into living tissue . They therefore fulfill all of the idiosyncratic prerequisites of the mysterious TSE causal agent, which no other bacterial or protein only causal theory has previously achieved.

And its not only Texas Uni that have supported by hypothesis . Auburn Uni have shown that once these metal microcrystals contaminate tissues, they do indeed seed the growth of the rogue metal prion protein crystal fibrils which cause BSE.

I find it absolutely incredible that our government and scientific Institutions will now put the full force of public money behind a full scale funding of this kitsched up kindergarten scarestory on human remains causing BSE , whilst continuing to blindly ignore the well proven true cause of TSEs. We live in retrograde times.

Mark Purdey.2/9/05