Terry Bishop - whose wife Jayne was a victim of human mad cow disease CJD - has given evidence at the national inquiry into the lethal condition.

Mr Bishop, of Farm Close Road, Wheatley, made a statement at the inquiry in London and is due to go back on September 14.

He said he had given evidence of his wife Jayne's symptoms and how the disease had progressed until her death.

Mrs Bishop, 53, became the 24th victim of the brain-wasting disease at the beginning of February this year. She had been ill for a year before she died in the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford.

Her husband said: "What the inquiry is really interested in is how the deceased person - my wife or any of the other victims - contracted it and what were the symptoms.

"They are going very, very slowly, just building up a picture. They want to know how people contract it - but nobody knows that."

The national inquiry into bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) began earlier this year and is expected to last until mid-1999 and cost £2m. It will consider how the condition, which affected more than 170,000 cattle in this country, was transmitted to people in the form of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease - often called human mad cow disease.

The most popular theory is that people developed new variant CJD by eating beef from cattle which had been infected with BSE after being fed the remains of cattle or sheep carcasses.

Alternative theories suggest BSE might have been the result of chemicals used to treat cattle pests like warble fly in the 1970s.

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