Friend of Gummer loses his daughter to vCJD

Published on Friday 12 October 2007 01:25

A WOMAN who died from the human form of mad cow disease was the daughter of a friend of John Gummer, the former agriculture minister who fed his child a hamburger during the BSE crisis to try to show that beef was safe.

Elizabeth Smith, 23, a student, from Suffolk, died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) last week, three years after becoming ill.

Her father, retired vicar Roger Smith, said his daughter rarely ate burgers as a child and enjoyed a "normal, healthy diet".

He said Mr Gummer, who encouraged his four-year-old daughter Cordelia to eat a burger in front of TV cameras in 1990, was a "personal friend" and had been one of his parishioners.

Mr Smith said of his daughter's diet: "If you live in the depths of the countryside, there aren't burger bars everywhere, so she hardly ate any.

"It may be nothing to do with beef burgers. We don't want to scare people because it is an extremely rare disease. In fact, I would tell people to worry more about their driving than getting CJD."

Ms Smith, who had hoped to become a teacher, took ill in August 2004 but was not diagnosed with vCJD until March 2005.

Her father said: "She was unable to walk for the last two years of her life and couldn't speak or smile. She had to be cared for 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"She was more helpless for those last two years than when she was born - at least then she could move her arms and cry, but by the end she couldn't even do that."