BRITAIN:The daughter of a friend of former British agriculture minister John Gummer, who tried to show beef was safe by encouraging his four-year-old child to eat a hamburger, has died from the human form of mad cow disease.
Student Elizabeth Smith (23), of St Margaret, South Elmham, Suffolk, died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) on October 4th, three years after becoming ill.
Her father, retired vicar Roger Smith, yesterday said Ms Smith rarely ate burgers as a child and enjoyed a "normal, healthy diet".
Mr Smith said Mr Gummer, who encouraged his daughter Cordelia to eat a burger in front of TV cameras in 1990, was a "personal friend" and had been one of his parishioners. He said Mr Gummer, who lives near Debenham, Suffolk, had been unfairly treated by the press.
"I think her [ Elizabeth's] average consumption of burgers was probably about 1 per cent of the national average," said Mr Smith. "If you live in the depths of the countryside, like Elizabeth did, there aren't burger bars everywhere so she hardly ate any."
He added: "She ate a perfectly normal and healthy diet . . . It may be nothing to do with beef burgers. If people knew precisely where the disease came from they would be able to stop it."
Mr Smith said Mr Gummer's photocall had not affected his views on meat. "John Gummer was a parishioner and a personal friend.
"John, not for the only time in his life, was unfairly treated by the press," he added. "It was a load of old cobblers. It didn't change the way I viewed meat. It changed the way I viewed the press."
Mr Smith said his daughter was first diagnosed with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in 2005. She was a student at Birmingham University at the time.
"She first became ill in August 2004 but it wasn't diagnosed for another seven months. She was able to stay at university until March 2005," he said. "By August 2005 she was a very, very sick person. She was unable to walk for the last two years of her life and couldn't speak or smile."
Mr Smith added: "We don't want to scare people because it is an extremely rare disease. Not everyone is going to die from it.
"In fact I would tell people to worry more about their driving than getting CJD."