Neuropathologist Dr James Ironside led the ground breaking CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh, which opened in 1991 five years after BSE was discovered in cattle.

Victim's brain samples contained unusual protein

Dr Ironside's evidence will make clear that the unit was set up specifically to look for evidence of BSE affecting people, despite consistent government assurances at the time that beef was safe to eat.

He says in a statement to the inquiry: "The role of the unit was to identify and study all cases of CJD in the United Kingdom in order to detect any change in the incidence or nature of the disease that might be attributable to the effect of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) agent in man."

Doctors throughout the UK were contacted and asked to help by allowing material from suspected CJD cases to be examined at the unit.

In 1995, Dr Ironside became increasingly concerned about a series of victims aged under 45, whose deaths were unusual, as CJD is normally a disease of the elderly.

It appeared that some of these represented "an unusual and possibly novel neuropathological phenotype," he said.

The "new variant" cases were characterised by deposits of protein in the brain and physical changes to the brain's motor co-ordination centre, the basal ganglia.

Dr Ironside and Dr Robert Will described eight of these cases at a meeting of the Government's Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) on March 8, 1996.

That day, a brain sample examination was performed on a further patient in Edinburgh, which was found to exhibit features of "new variant" CJD.

Ten cases came to light before the government announcement

On March 18, the scientists were called back from a Paris conference by the Department of Health, which said an announcement on "new variant" CJD was to be made in the House of Commons.

The following day, Dr Ironside travelled to Newcastle where a 10th case of the new disease had come to light.

On March 20, Dr Ironside and Dr Will watched the then Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell on television, making the announcement which sparked the beef crisis.

As the implications of Mr Dorrell's announcement sank in, the unit's day-to-day functions were swamped under a flood of media enquiries from all over the world.