CJD campaign mum takes her fight to Parliament
 
Published on the 06 February
2014
06:57
Published 06/02/2014 06:57
A MOTHER who lost her son to the human form of mad cow disease is hoping the government has listened to her pleas.
Christine Lord, from Southsea, went to parliament yesterday to give evidence to a committee about blood sampling and vCJD.
The 56-year-old lost her son Andrew after he contracted the human strain of BSE.
Since his death in 2007, she has been campaigning to get people’s blood sampled for the disease before they are allowed to donate blood.
And Ms Lord feels her visit to parliament was effective but believes she will need to produce more evidence before the Department of Health brings in the blood sample test.
Ms Lord said: ‘I am hopeful after I gave my side of the argument in parliament.
‘I had a lot of evidence with me that backed up my points and validated what I was trying to say.
‘But every time I made a point, an expert stood up and said I was wrong. I might not be a scientist but I have lived through what the disease does. They control what goes on and all the time they are against the screening process, it won’t happen.’
Ms Lord has written a book entitled Who Killed My Son? and in it she describes the death of her son as ‘an unlawful killing’.
She also said that many thousands more people could be unknowingly infected with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJd), caused by eating beef infected by bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
The incubation period of the disease is unknown but could be up to 40 years.
Ms Lord added: ‘People who ate beef in the 1980s and 1990s could have the disease and don’t know. I think the government don’t want the testing because it will prove they were in the wrong.
‘There could be law suits and all sorts. The Department of Health is keeping the whole thing hushed up because people are being discouraged to tell neighbours and other family members what is happening.’
Ms Lord watched her formerly healthy son go blind, suffer dementia and become quadriplegic as a result of being infected with vCJd.
To find out more about Ms Lord’s campaign, visit website justice4andy