On Fri, 08 Feb 2013 15:25:17 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Not so silly - wasn't BSE something to do with feeding meat of some
processed sort to cattle?

sheep

Or at least ex sheep that had been rendered down for the protien. ISTR
that there was some change to the law that reduced the rendering
time/temperature and allowed the scrapie prion survive and thus end up in
the cattle feed. Prions are tough molecules:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#Sterilization

--
Cheers
Dave.