BBC
News
 | | Five
people died in Queniborough's CJD cluster |
Investigators
say they have traced the exact cause of Britain's first CJD cluster in the village
of Queniborough in Leicester.
But the results will not be published until
villagers themselves are told on 21 March.
An inquiry was launched last
July after five people with close connections to Queniborough died from the illness.
An interim report into the cases of Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (vCJD) in
November decided that meat supplied locally was probably to blame for the cluster.
Scientists ruled out baby food and school meals as the source of the infection.
They also discounted drinking water supplies and the jobs done by the
five victims, who all lived within a five-kilometre (three-mile) radius of one
another.
Death toll
They said that the disproportionate
death toll from the disease was unlikely to be a coincidence.
The only
common link between the victims was that they all ate beef or beef products, but
they did not share a common butcher.
Dr Philip Monk, consultant in communicable
disease control at Leicester Health Authority, said the latest finding pointed
to an extremely obvious source.
He said: "Knowing what I know, it is extremely
obvious.
"When I shared with colleagues what we had found, they said why
didn't we think of that before."
"Like so many scientific matters, it
was staring us in the face."
Leicester victims
The Leicestershire
vCJD cluster was first reported in November 1998, after the disease claimed three
lives within 12 weeks that year.
Glen Day, 35, from Queniborough and Pamela
Beyless, 24, from nearby Glenfield died in October 1988.
Stacey Robinson,
19, formerly of Queniborough, had died two months earlier in August.
A
19-year-old man died from the disease in May this year at the Leicester Royal
Infirmary and at the same time health officials said it was "highly probable"
that a 24-year-old man in the county had also contracted the disease.
A
fifth person, a male farm worker, died in September, last year. |
