The price of beef

The price of beef ; ;The government has announced compensation for BSE sufferers.

But the lawyer who was intrumental in presenting the families anguish to Whitehall tells Victoria MacCallum that the fight is far from over ;The announcement at the end of last month that ;the government was to offer sufferers of the human form of BSE a multi-million pound compensation package came too late for Zoe Jeffries.

;Zoe was the youngest victim of new variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (nvCJD), and she died, aged 14, days before the Labour government admitted its moral responsibility to compensate the 83 families so far who have lost someone to the disease.

;News of the compensation package followed quickly the publication of the Phillips Report into the handling of the crisis that has stalked Britain since the late 1980s.

The mammoth ;16-volume report criticised the Whitehall culture of secrecy, where the true scale of the nvCJD epidemic was constantly denied by ministers over fears of creating a mass public health scare.

;Although it frequently seemed loath to criticise individuals for example, former agriculture minister John Gummers notorious feeding of a hamburger to his young daughter at the height of the crisis is something for which he ought not to be criticised the report was nevertheless inflammatory enough to warrant an immediate promise of compensation by the Labour government.

;This compensation offer, according to David Body, head of clinical negligence at Sheffield-based Irwin Mitchell and the lawyer representing the families of the affected, has come ;not a minute too soon.

The government has spent more than ;4 billion on compensation for the crisis, he says.

Farmers who ;have lost cattle have been compensated, the meat industry has been compensated, but many people who have lost children or members of their families have so far not received a penny.

;Mr Body has a history of fighting for government compensation for his clients.

He first became involved with victims of nvCJD back in 1996 because of his previous litigation work with victims of yet another form of CJD, this time contracted through the use of human growth hormones.

Many of the donors of the growth hormones had died from a human strain of CJD, which was then passed on to children suffering from dwarfism who had the infected hormones given as part of a government-sponsored trial.

;Mr Body discovered proof that halfway through the trials, which ran from 1959 to 1985, the government had been warned by one of its own scientists that continuing to dispense the drug could cause the transmission of CJD.

As a result, Mr Body won more than 6 million compensation for the 30 families he represented, in what was the first civil damages victory against the Department of Health.

;As a result of this work, a year after the death of Stephen Churchill, the first person to die from nvCJD in 1995, the Human BSE Foundation contacted Mr Body.

However, he is keen to stress that the initial aim was ;not to press for compensation.

Compensation was quite a late starter for the families, he explains.

Our priority was to have a full public inquiry into the events surrounding the epidemic.

The families wanted to know why this had happened, and so for the first two years of the ;case I mainly lobbied agriculture and health ministers.

;Matters were helped by the change of government in 1997 The Tories were very opposed to any sort of inquiry, says Mr Body and by autumn 1997 he had the support of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Transport and General Workers Union, the former chairman of SEAC (the government advisory body on BSE) and even, surprisingly, former agriculture minister Douglas Hogg, who maintained ;that an inquiry would vindicate the Conservative handling of BSE.

In December 1997, despite some initial reluctance, Tony Blair agreed to a full public inquiry, which started work ;early the next year.

;The inquiry, the results of which were made public last month, constituted an exhaustive scrutiny of the UKs public health and agriculture practices, amassing so much information that structural engineers were called into its south London headquarters to reinforce the floors.

;Mr Body found that much of his time was spent sifting through this mass of information, distilling it for his clients, explaining who was saying what and what it meant for them.

He also helped the families he represented all 83 by this stage ; prepare for their giving of evidence to the inquiry, where they would describe the levels of support and care the victims needed.

;Care was an issue that the families pushed to the top of the inquirys agenda.

After wanting to find out why and how this had happened, says Mr Body, the families next priority was to ensure that other people who suffered had a decent care package provided for them.

It was a postcode lottery, with some areas of the country providing excellent care, and others not.

;As a result, when the inquiry was in full flow in 1998, Mr Body prepared a report for the Department of Health recommending the establishment of a CJD support unit for sufferers, and the suggestions have mostly been taken up by the government.

;Compensation for the families blighted by the disease was next on the agenda for Mr Body.

Thanks to the admission of liability and offer of compensation made by the government, he will not have to go to court to get it.

A no-fault compensation scheme is right and proper, he says.

However, the structure of the scheme will have to be set up with great care its going to deal with cases that have happened in the past, are happening now, and also ones that havent even happened yet.

The compensation will have to last out until the final nvCJD case comes to light and who knows when that will be five years, twenty-five years? ;Another problem is the different nature of all the cases, and the resulting inconsistencies in payment for example, should a family which lost a young child to nvCJD be awarded the same amount as a widow left with three dependent children? Working out the compensation scheme will take time, admits ;Mr Brody.

Ive been in discussions with the Department of Health about it, and I will have to advise all the clients individually.

;However, matters taking time is something that he has become used to the entire nvCJD litigation has taken up more than four years of his and his four-strong teams time, and has produced several rooms worth of paperwork.

So why is it so important? The whole BSE scandal incorporates a wide spectrum of issues, and so many facets of the story had to come out, he explains.

;Its not only about agricultural practices, its about how the government regulates food.

How do they balance their priorities consumer safety versus the economic interests of the cattle industry? Its also about how the government takes advice on scientific issues what impact should that have on their policies? What should they do when the public are at risk? ;He maintains firmly that the governments attitude should ;be a precautionary one, and situations such as the nvCJD epidemic arise when precautionary regulations have fallen down.

However, he has detected a change in the governments attitude since the emergence of the true scale of the epidemic.

They seem now to be actively espousing precautionary attitudes based on scientific evidence, he says.

It seems that the families have already wrought a change.

;This, according to Mr Body, is all they have ever wanted.

;I feel very lucky to have worked with these inspirational families.

When you see these people dying, it puts an anger into your soul, but these families have channelled their grief into something purposeful.

They ;just want to ensure that nothing ;like this ever happens again, ;he says.