‘Mad cow disease is back in Britain – and I’m convinced my mum’s shocking death is a result of all the beef she ate’
As a case is confirmed in Aberdeen, two decades on from the national epidemic in the 1990s, one woman is convinced the disease killed her mother
AS Yvonne Hibberd lay dying in a hospital bed, her daughter Emma couldn't understand how it was only a matter of weeks since her mum had been a fit and lively 60-year-old doing regular sessions at the gym and working in a busy shoe shop.
But after a sudden fall, Yvonne mysteriously lost the ability to walk, speak or swallow, became very aggressive and was dead within six weeks.
Doctors diagnosed her with Creuzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a particularly nasty illness which rapidly destroys the brain.
But now, five years on, Emma believes her mother's death was caused by mad cow disease, having contracted it from eating infected meat years earlier.
This week’s grim news that a case of BSE - or mad cow disease - has been confirmed at a farm in Aberdeenshire will stir graphic memories of infected cattle being burned en masse on open bonfires across the British countryside in the 1980s and 1990s, when 4.4 million cattle were killed to curb it spreading.
It is also bound to rouse new fears about the dangers of CJD, the human form of BSE.
But for Emma it hit home even harder.
A fatal disease and six weeks to live
“Initially Mum’s doctor diagnosed her with depression but then she had a nasty fall downstairs so we took her to A&E and she was admitted to Gloucestershire Royal Hospital in August 2013,” Emma Taylor, 46, tells Sun Online.
By this point Yvonne was struggling to walk and having serious memory problems so Emma insisted that scans be done to try to work out what was wrong.
“Mum became very aggressive and just wasn’t herself, but nothing showed up on the scans,” Emma says.
By chance, one of the nurses on the ward had worked previously with someone with CJD.
There are two types of CJD: sporadic and variant. The former is caused when healthy proteins spontaneously become misshapen and form chains that build up in the brain. This is what doctors concluded she had.
But the second type, variant, is likely to be caused by eating meat from a cow with BSE - and this is what Emma firmly believes her mum contracted.
'A broken body in a hospital bed'
Approximately 120 new cases of sporadic CJD are diagnosed in the UK each year, and the disease causes around one in every 5,000 deaths.
Emma, who works in procurement for the NHS, says: “Mum quickly became disorientated, her movements were jerky, she became incontinent, she couldn’t support herself in bed, then she fell into a coma in the final days. It was shocking to see the rapid decline in her.
"She faded away in front of us in the space of few weeks and became a shell, a broken body in a hospital bed.
"What hurt most was that there was absolutely nothing we could to to help her.”
Mad cow disease from mince and beef
The incubation period between infection and the disease being diagnosed can be several decades - so in theory if someone had eaten infected meat in the 1990s, they may only begin to show signs now.
“Variant CJD can only be diagnosed post-mortem,” Emma says.
“But when Mum died in November 2013, we felt she’d been through enough so we didn’t want one.
“When I think about how much processed meat she ate when she was younger – so much mince and beef and red meat – I’m convinced Mum had variant CJD,” says Emma, who lives in Stroud with her partner and 16-year-old son, Conor.
It was in 1995 that the first known victim of mad cow disease, 19-year-old Stephen Churchill, died and a year on the European Commission imposed a worldwide ban on all British beef exports.
Over 180,000 cows were infected after being fed infected meat including brain and spinal cords. These parts of the animal are no longer put back into the food chain.
Investigations are now underway to identify the origin of the latest BSE case in Aberdeenshire - the first in Scotland in a decade - which was found after an animal died and before any contaminated meat entered the human food chain.
There are understood to have been 16 cases of BSE in the UK in the last seven years, the last in 2015 in Wales.
In the latest case, the infected animal didn't enter the food chain and Food Standards Scotland said, and it's an isolated case.
Other cattle that had been in contact with the animal will found and killed.
Yesterday’s bad news comes only a week after researchers in London revealed they had developed an antibody, called PRN100, for treating it.
The Prion Unit at University College London is set to give the antibody to a patient in a world-first, after the Court of Protection confirmed that it was in the patient’s best interests to receive the unlicensed treatment.
Nobody welcomes the news of a potentially successful treatment for sporadic CJD more than 75 year-old Colin Beatty, who lost his wife of 40 years to the disease in 2010.
Colin says if the PRN100 antibody had been available at the time he would have wanted his wife, who died at the age of 70, to be treated with it.
The diagnosis was devastating, like a bomb had gone off in our family," Colin, from Dorset, who now campaigns for a cure for CJD tells Sun Online. "We cried many tears."
The disease affected Annie's speech and thought processes and she began to wander off without warning.
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"It was heartbreaking to watch Annie deteriorate," he says.
University College London Hospital’s chief executive Professor Marcel Levi says: “There is currently no cure or treatment for CJD.
"At present, caring for patients with CJD involves trying to use medicines to alleviate symptoms only but sadly, the disease always results in the rapid death of the patient."