The daughter of a close friend of John Gummer, who famously tried to feed his own child a burger to prove that beef was safe, has died from the human form of mad cow disease.

Elizabeth Smith, whose funeral is due to be held today, died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) last week at the age of 23. Her parents, Roger and Molly Smith, said that they found out she had the disease on her 21st birthday.

Mr Gummer, who was Agriculture Minister during the first outbreak of BSE, was pilloried in 1990 for trying to feed his daughter, Cordelia, a burger in front of television cameras. She shrank away from the burger, but he took a large bite himself, pronouncing it “absolutely delicious”. The link between eating beef and vCJD was confirmed six years later.

Mr and Mrs Smith, of St Margaret South Elmham, Suffolk, paid tribute yesterday to the way their daughter had fought the disease and defended Mr Gummer, saying that he had been unfairly treated in the press.

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Mr Smith said that his daughter rarely ate burgers as a child and enjoyed a healthy diet. “I think her average consumption was probably about one per cent of the national average,” Mr Smith said. “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. 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, who was vicar of Mendham and Metfield, said that Mr Gummer was a “personal friend” and had been one of his parishioners. He said that the infamous photocall involving the former minister had not affected his views about meat or his friend.

“John, not for the only time in his life, was unfairly treated by the press,” Mr Smith said. “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 Gummer, who lives near Debenham, Suffolk, was unavailable for comment last night.

Miss Smith had been an undergraduate studying at the University of Birmingham when vCJD was diagnosed in March 2005. Mr Smith said that the news had been extremely difficult at first because the symptoms were similar to other illnesses.

“Initially the symptoms can be confused with depression. Elizabeth wasn’t depressed but she had numbness in her face and we thought it was MS [multiple sclerosis].

“Then she started having short-term memory loss but because her brain was young she was able to compensate, which is why she was able to carry on at university.”

“However, by the time she came home she found that she had trouble swallowing and then couldn’t swallow at all so for the last 2½ years she was fitted with a gastro-tube.

“After that the disease was remorseless in the way that it killed her off. 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.”

Miss Smith had wished to become a primary school teacher. She gained a place on a postgraduate training course while already four months into the disease. She died on October 4 at the family home.

She was the 162nd person to die from the disease. Although five victims have been vegetarians, most cases developed as a result of eating infected meat in the 1980s. The disease has also been transmitted by blood transfusion and infected surgical equipment.

Mr and Mrs Smith, who also have a son, Andrew, 39, said that they did not wish to alarm people about eating meat.

“We don’t want to scare people because it is an extremely rare disease. Not everyone is going to die from it,” Mr Smith said. “In fact I would tell people to worry more about their driving than getting CJD.”

BSE was first diagnosed in cows in the 1980s. It was spread through commercial feed, which contained meat and bonemeal from infected cattle. The link between eating beef and vCJD was established in 1995 when Stephen Churchill, 19, became the first vCJD victim.

It was not until 1996 that the Government extended the ban on the feeding of meat and bonemeal to all farmed animals.

Earlier this year, researchers at the National CJD Surveillance Unit at the University of Edinburgh developed way of confirming whether someone has fatal levels of abnormal proteins, thought to cause CJD.

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