LONDON - A coroner ruled yesterday that a 20 year old vegetarian who died of the brain wasting Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (CJD) caught it from eating hamburgers as a child. The verdict is the first to legally link a human death to BSE.
The coroner, Mr Geoffrey Burt, told the inquest in Durham that Peter Hall had died of a new variant of CJD in February, contracted prior to 1990 through eating "some form of contaminated beef product, such as a beefburger".
In March last British government scientists said they had identified a new type of CJD. They said it was likely people caught it from eating beef infected with BSE.