CJD killed our son ... don't let his seven months of hell happen

A MAN suffering from Mad Cow Disease was locked up with mental patients for seven months after a hospital refused his family's plea for special nursing.

Jason Keat, 25, was left on a mental ward with violent patients after health workers refused to believe his parents' claims that he might have the human form of BSE.

Now Linda and Ian Keat have called on Health Secretary Frank Dobson to launch an investigation into the horrific treatment their son received.

They want a personal undertaking that no family will ever have to endure the same nightmare again.

Jason's death from new variant CJD - Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease - on February 28 was later confirmed by a post-mortem.

"We had always believed that health professionals in this country were fully briefed to look out for this disease and to check things thoroughly," said Mr Keat.

"But we received virtually no help from official sources and for almost all the time we felt that professionals regarded us as people who had no knowledge of what we were talking about and whose views could be safely disregarded."

Jason, a former member of the RAF, was a popular, happy-go-lucky young man.

But his family, who lived in Bridlington, Yorkshire, at the time, were left in fear for their own lives as the deadly disease turned him into a monster.

The former slaughterhouse worker who was involved in the killing of BSE cattle became a violent brute who regularly attacked his 26- year-old wife Christine.

But he was officially diagnosed as suffering from depression.

In July last year, Christine and Jason's mother Linda were forced to flee the house when he went on the rampage.

After 42 phone calls for help, Jason was arrested and committed to Bridlington Hospital the following day under the Mental Health Act.

His distraught parents believed he would finally get a proper assessment and treatment for his condition.

They claim they begged for him to be given the same specialist nursing that they believe every other young CJD victim has received.

But to their horror he was left on a mental ward with violent patients.

Mr Keat said: "I find it unbelievable that such things could happen in this country.

"At no time did anyone who mattered realise the significance of CJD or, if they did, they did not consider it sufficiently serious to think about other ways of dealing with Jason's case.

"He was not just a healthy young person with a psychiatric problem."

It was only after the intervention of Professor Bob Will, head of the Government's CJD surveillance unit in Edinburgh, who was called in at the Keats' request, that Jason was diagnosed as "almost certainly" having the killer disease.

But Mr Keat says that even after this diagnosis the hospital still refused to move his son from the psychiatric ward.

Hospital officials, he says, claimed that as Jason had no medical condition they were able to treat he did not qualify for a move to general care.

Jason received no medication and his parents' pleas for him to be taken in by other hospitals and specialist units were rejected out of hand.

Mr Keat said: "Our son should have been treated with as much dignity as the health service of this country could provide, especially given the nature of his illness. He was not.

"He was basically abandoned amid psychiatric patients with no-one interested in the fact that he was another new victim of this terrifying disease.

"As far as I can see, no other victim has been dealt with in this way."

Mr and Mrs Keat claim their son's imprisonment in a unit not equipped to deal with a highly-dangerous illness also placed many others at extreme risk.

The couple were "deeply concerned and worried" that staff handling Jason's body fluids did not know he had CJD.

And they were horrified to learn that his soiled clothing was given to another relative to wash at home.

Two weeks before he died, Jason was finally moved into the care of Macmillan nurses in a ward just a few hundred yards down the corridor.

Alex Henderson, the nursing director of the East Yorkshire Community Healthcare NHS Trust, refused to discuss the details of Jason's case.

But she insisted that "in complex cases there is always full discussion with family, staff and other professionals about the most appropriate plan of care and place of treatment".

Mrs Henderson added that "a proportion of patients with new variant CJD display symptoms of psychiatric illness which may need appropriate treatment.

"It is standard practice with uncommon conditions to seek expert advice from specialists - in the case of CJD from the surveillance unit in Edinburgh.

"In all cases we would follow advice and ensure that the staff are equipped with appropriate knowledge, skills and other resources to deliver the highest quality of care."

But Ian and his wife, who now live in Somerset, believe the health service and other back-up services completely failed them and their son.

They have called for specialist facilities to be put in place to care for future CJD victims.

They also want every health region in Britain to appoint an official to oversee the care of victims and to liaise with victims' families.

"Nothing can bring Jason back and nothing will stop us having nightmares and feeling guilty that we were powerless to prevent things which we believe added to his suffering," said Mr Keat.

"But the only thing his mother and I can now do is make sure that his suffering and the way in which the system failed us when we needed it most are changed so others don't have to see the sights we saw."

Since the Sunday Mirror contacted the Department of Health, Frank Dobson has agreed to provide Edinburgh's CJD Surveillance Unit with more resources to respond to the needs of patients and their families.

The Department has also announced that it will provide funding for two expert co-ordinators in CJD care.

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