A SURVEY of British farmers suggests it’s unlikely sheep became widely
infected with BSE when the disease was raging in British cattle.
If you feed meat and bone meal (MBM) from cattle with BSE to sheep as an
experiment, they develop symptoms similar to scrapie, a common prion disease in
sheep that is not thought to spread to humans. This led to fears that BSE was
spreading unnoticed in sheep during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the
disease was rife in British cattle, and sheep ate bovine MBM.
If sheep had become widely infected, people might have eaten…
