Matthew Parker: another young victim of CJD

Demand for Public Inquiry into CJD

Last week a coroner recorded a verdict of death by misadventure on Matthew - a trainee chef - saying he probably caught the disease from eating beef contaminated with BSE.

Doreen Parker

interviewed on BBC Television

Mrs Parker says officials have failed to come up with satisfactory answers for her son's death. She has accused them of sweeping Matthew's death, and those of other young victims of the new strain of CJD, under the carpet. "We are demanding a public inquiry," she said. "None of them should be just a statistic. They were healthy human beings. We need to know why they are dying.

"We want to know why he died and why the others died, why it got into the food chain and to learn by it. We need to learn from it so there can never be another tragedy like this," she added.

Mrs Parker says the families of victims should be offered better support. She has had to rely on other victims' families for help and information on the disease when her son became ill. She warned that the disease could still reach epidemic proportions.

BSE: more questions than answers

She says she is constantly worried about the health of her other teenage son. "Every morning he wakes up and thinks, `is this going to be day I get CJD?'," she said.

Matthew Parker died in March, four months after going into hospital with symptoms of the disease which has been linked to infected beef.

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