RSPCA campaigner dies of CJD

The baroness was a devoted campaigner for animal welfare

The vice president of the RSPCA, Baroness Ziki Wharton, has died after losing her battle against a form of CJD.

She had been seriously ill in hospital with sporadic CJD, which is not connected to variant CJD, the human form of mad cow disease.

The baroness, 66, was a crossbench peer in the House of Lords and a longtime campaigner for animal welfare.

She was often the first to raise parliamentary awareness of important issues, such as the overhaul of outdated quarantine laws and the banning of puppy farms.

Director general of the RSPCA, Peter Davies, who was also a personal friend, said he was deeply saddened by her death.

'Tremendous vigour'

"Baroness Wharton was a woman of tremendous vigour who showed a life-long commitment to animal welfare and she will be sorely missed," he said.

"Her personal commitment to such campaigns undoubtedly contributed in no small measure to their success."

News of her death at London's Charing Cross Hospital was announced by her doctor, Angus Kennedy, a consultant neurologist at the West London Neurosciences Centre.

Her condition, sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is a rare brain disease named after the two German neurologists who separately diagnosed patients with its symptoms in the 1920s.

The common age of onset is over 55, but in the mid-1990s researchers identified a new form of CJD - variant CJD - which affects younger people and is linked to mad cow disease.

The baroness, a widow who leaves three sons and a daughter, had been vice president of the RSPCA since 1997.