Gummer family friend's CJD tragedy
Updated on 11 October 2007
The daughter of a friend of former 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 4, three years after becoming ill.
Her father, retired vicar Roger Smith, said Miss 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 he thought 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% 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 went on: "She ate a perfectly normal and healthy diet.
"Sometimes she would have meat with a meal, sometimes she wouldn't. It wasn't one particular kind of meat, either. 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.
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