The families of vCJD (variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease) victims have lost a High Court battle over a claim that the compensation scheme for victims of the disease is flawed.

BBC News reports that on Friday (05/03/10), Mr Justice Silber dismissed a case brought by Annie McVey, from Devon, whose 15-year-old daughter Claire died in 2000 from vCJD – the human form of the animal infection BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy).

Mrs McVey had alleged that the government’s compensation scheme for vCJD victims and their families was ‘highly complicated’ – and a decision not to change it was unlawful. The High Court challenge was contested on behalf of the Secretary of State for Health.

Mr Justice Silber dismissed the case after judgment was reserved at a hearing in January.

‘Although I am totally sympathetic to their present predicaments, my duty is to apply legal principles,’ he said at the hearing on Friday.

However, he added that the more documents he had read regarding families affected by vCJD, ‘the more I have appreciated how tragic the consequences have been for the claimants' families of having a member with vCJD’.

The government set up a compensation scheme for victims of vCJD and their families in 2002, after cases began to emerge among those who had eaten infected beef. The disease was first diagnosed in the 1980s and was traced to eating beef from BSE infected cattle. BSE is also known as ‘mad cow disease’.

When the compensation scheme was established – to be managed by the vCJD Trust – the government set aside £67.5m for the first 250 cases, with plans to review the sum if the number of cases exceeded 250.

The scheme involved a ‘no fault’ lump sum and a discretionary award based on the care families had to give to loved ones infected with vCJD.

However, families claimed that the compensation scheme was ‘complicated’ – and the stress of having to claim for a discretionary award added to their distress over losing a loved one to vCJD.

Mrs McVey described the process as an ‘administrative nightmare’.

‘We were already in a state of distress having lost somebody,’ she said.

‘We were then given forms where we had to itemise how much care we did, what time we did it, when we did it, who did it, how much pain they were in, how much we saw them in that, how much it cost us to travel to hospital, providing parking tickets. It just became overwhelming.’

Mrs McVey’s own claim has been settled but she said she wanted to make the compensation claim process easier for other families. The first victim of vCJD died in 1995 and in total there have been 176 vCJD cases in the UK – four people infected with vCJD are still alive today. Around £38.5 million has been paid out by the vCJD compensation scheme to date.

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