The hypothesis — which has little hard evidence to support it — is published this week in The Lancet by Alan Colchester, a medical professor at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and his daughter Nancy, a veterinary medicine specialist at the University of Edinburgh.

They suggest that haphazard Hindu funeral practices led to contamination in India of animal bone meal with human bones. Some may have come from people who died of vCJD and whose partially cremated bodies had been cast into the Ganges, only to be scavenged and recycled. If so, bone meal contaminated with vCJD could have entered the animal food chain in Britain, caused the outbreak of BSE in cattle, and then transferred to people as vCJD, the human equivalent of BSE.

They concede that evidence is circumstantial, but say it is strong enough to justify further research. Indian experts are sceptical, saying that scientists must “proceed cautiously when hypothesising about a disease that has such wide geographic, cultural and religious implications”.

To support the idea it would be necessary to show that vCJD is identical to a human CJD present in India, that it could infect cows through feedstuffs, and that the importation of contaminated bonemeal is plausible.

The Colchesters suggest a series of investigations into these questions. But two Indian CJD experts said that even if human waste contaminated exported bonemeal, the dilution would be so enormous that the product would be unlikely to infect cows in Britain.

They also note that incidence of prion disease is no higher in India than elsewhere and that no study has been carried out to established whether putrefied human tissue, taken from the Ganges, contained prion disease, or if it could be transmissible.

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