'My daughter has been denied justice'

Case study: Claire McVey

Annie McVey knew exactly how her daughter, Claire, the youngest victim so far to have died of vCJD, would have felt yesterday as the causes of the disease which killed her were revealed in 4,000 pages of official text. She would have been furious.

Annie McVey knew exactly how her daughter, Claire, the youngest victim so far to have died of vCJD, would have felt yesterday as the causes of the disease which killed her were revealed in 4,000 pages of official text. She would have been furious.

The 15-year-old schoolgirl died in a hospice close to her mother's home in Devon on 11 January, less than six months after she was diagnosed with the cruel degenerative illness which transformed her from an ebullient teenager to a human shell.

Her mother, who travelled to hear at first hand the BSE inquiry's explanation of vCJD, described how her daughter had been driven by a sense of justice which would have yesterday driven her to confront those responsible.

Standing in the crowded corridors of the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, just 500 yards from the Whitehall departments where the decisions about BSE were made in the late Eighties and early Nineties, Ms McVey said: "Claire had wanted to be a lawyer from the age of six. She was driven by a sense of justice and she would have been absolutely furious today because she was robbed of something that it was her right to have - her life."

Ms McVey, 42, who praised the thoroughness of Lord Phillips' 16-volume report, said she was not looking for recriminations or demanding the heads of civil servants and ministers deemed culpable for the BSE crisis. Instead, the normally shy nurse, of Kentisbury Ford, Devon, said she had taken on her daughter's determination to see the faults that led to the genesis of vCJD resolved. She said: "Claire was a thriving young woman with a burning sense of right. I have to carry that through."

Ms McVey said that she had first realised her daughter, a lover of drama and music, was ill in June last year when she suddenly became depressed.

An MRI scan at a Bristol hospital on 5 August last year confirmed the degenerative illness they had feared, vCJD. Like so many of the other 80 deaths from the disease, what followed for Claire was a creeping loss of the rationality, vigour and determination for which her mother loved her.

But before the physical manifestations became obvious, Ms McVey honoured her daughter's wish to know everything. She said: "Claire was ferociously independent and wanted to be in control of her life. When she asked me if she was going to die, I could not conceal the truth. She wrote out her will and laid out exactly what was supposed to happen, from who was to come to her funeral to the way she was to be buried. My daughter was a remarkable lady."