A family friend of John Gummer, the former Agriculture Minister who in 1990 tried to show that beef was safe by encouraging his 4-year-old child to eat a hamburger in front of the cameras, has died from the human form of "mad cow" disease.

Elizabeth Smith, 23, a student from St Margaret South Elmham, Suffolk, died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) on October 4, three years after becoming ill.

Her father, Roger Smith, a retired vicar, said today that his own daughter had rarely eaten burgers as a child and had enjoyed a normal, healthy diet.

“I think her [Elizabeth’s] average consumption of burgers was probably about 1 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.

“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, who encouraged his daughter Cordelia to eat a burger in front of TV cameras in 1990 in order to demonstrate that humans were at no danger from mad cow disease, was a personal 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 Smith said his daughter was first diagnosed with vCJD in 2005.

He said Miss Smith, who was reading geography at Birmingham University, needed round-the-clock care as the disease took hold.

“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.

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