One doctor would be telling me she was going to die, another that she had something physical wrong. She began showing symptoms of nv-CJD while pregnant."We were going to take her to the neurologist for an appointment and we found that she had peeled all the skin off one foot .. We first mentioned CJD to [the neurologist] I had read about three cases in the newspaper His reaction? He was flummoxed .. They were umming and ahhing I think it took them aback ... The consultant [who made the diagnosis] wouldn't speak to me, avoided me like the plague. My GP was willing to help but the district nurses were ...always too busy."ANTHONY BOWEN's wife Michelle died, aged 29, three weeks after giving birth. I got to the stage where I asked for help from social services at the hospital But there was never anybody available to speak to me. just smiled."MARIE LAWRENCE learnt that her husband Michael Clifford had been diagnosed with nv-CJD while he was in hospital."I was told quite abruptly, quite coldly, by the ward nurse that I should find him other accommodation, that there wasn't anything they could do for him .. I didn't know it was a terminal disease; nobody told me. But when it came to caring for him, he was a young lad: I didn't want a stranger changing his clothes, his bed.

But it got so much more difficult when it got to the stage where we couldn't lift him up the stairs, or get him out of the bath because he was so frightened that he couldn't help himself.By the time he went back into hospital most of his faculties had gone He couldn't do much He ... Her life expectancy is three to 12 months, and it will be horrific as a disease'. There was a social worker, but all she provided was incontinence pads."FRANCES HALL is a nurse. Her son Peter died aged 20, one of the first victims of nv-CJD."The hospital had said it was a degenerative neurological condition So I expected to lose Peter.

If any group can claim ownership of this inquiry, we can."Unanswered Questions: The Pain of Victims' RelativesJOHN WILLIAMS is the father of Alison, who started showing unusual behaviour in the early 1990s."She used to be very active, liking sailing and walking and golf. Then she locked herself in her bedroom and wouldn't have anything to do with us Her weight dropped She entered a psychiatric wing of a hospital. But after a week they said it wasn't a psychiatric illness, it was physical When the diagnosis came through, my GP said 'It's a tragedy. Social Services are also governed by their dogma as to what their staff can and cannot do, and because of this they are quite impotent."Yet the families' solicitors released yesterday a paper calculating that round-the-clock care - which nv-CJD patients need toward the end of their incurable illness, when they lose speech and muscle power and become incontinent - costs about pounds 40,000 annually.The families will continue giving evidence today, in the sixth stage of the inquiry into the causes of the BSE epidemic that affected hundreds of thousands of cattle.Gerard Callaghan, whose brother, Maurice, died in November 1995, said: "Today marks the point where the inquiry changes direction. In some places, wheelchairs did not arrive until after the sufferer had died, or visiting nurses refused to help, apart from delivering bedding supplies. Essential items to make a bed safe took weeks to arrive - and then came separately.One family found that in moving from Lincolnshire to Kent, the quality of care plummeted as their requirements became entangled in red tape.The low quality of diagnosis and care still persisted, despite the growing awareness of nv-CJD, the families claimed.In written evidence, Arthur Beyless, whose daughter, Pamela, died aged 24 earlier this month, said that apart from a doctor from the National CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh, "no one else talked to us about CJD and its implications on the sufferer".The Beyless family, of Leicester, also found that "the Department of Social Services are entrenched in their rules: one of which is not to pay carers who live with those requiring care. Emissions from the energy sector, meaning the production of electricity and of fuels such as oil and coal, have been falling steeply in the 1990s, principally because of the "dash for gas" - the decline of the coal industry under the Tory government and the replacement of many traditional coal-fired power stations with gas-fired plants, which emit much less carbon dioxide.

"The devolution legislation therefore includes powers that could be used, if needed, to ensure that the devolved administrations contribute equitably to the achievement of the UK target."TransportTHIS IS the Government's most difficult problem. The new contract follows the BBC's humiliating loss of Test match cricket to Channel 4 less than two weeks ago. The corporation is believed to have paid around pounds 3m a year for the five-year deal with UK Athletics 98, compared with the pounds 1m a year that was previously paid by Channel 4 under a contract secured in 1996. The athletics contract, though, is small beer compared with the loss of the pounds 103m rights to cricket, and a Channel 4 spokesperson said: "the BBC wouldn't have touched it with a barge pole two years ago."In 1996 Channel 4 won the contract unopposed.Alan Yentob, the BBC's director of television, said yesterday: "This is a real relationship and marks a long term commitment to a sport which has broad appeal across age, gender and culture," adding that athletics had the potential to be a sport which "gripped Britain".The contract covers both indoor and outdoor events from 1999 to 2004. With thousands or even millions of animals, this can be in significant amounts.The Government thinks both emissions will fall by 2010, largely because of more environmentally friendly farming,lower levels of animal stocking and less fertiliser use.EnergyTHIS IS the Government's ray of sunshine.

"My son had been vegetarian since he was 15, but I stopped buying beef five years before, in the 1980s, when I heard about BSE," said Mrs Frances Hall, a nurse whose son, Peter, died in February 1996, aged 20."It was clearly a new disease in cattle, and it seemed a logical progression that it would go to other species," she said.The levels of care also fluctuated widely, creating what David Body, a solicitor for the families, called "care by postcode". The evidence given by 15 relatives from 11 families to the BSE inquiry yesterday offered few encouraging reports. John Williams was told by a neurologist that his daughter, Alison, had the inherited condition Huntington's chorea, which would have had health implications for the whole family. The neurologist insisted on this diagnosis for months, even as Alison was dying, and only admitted he was wrong after a post-mortem three weeks after Ms Williams had died. In some cases, the relatives had to inform medical staff of the possibility that the victim had a form of CJD - and had only realised this possibilitybecause of media coverage.Some families had consciously avoided beef because of the BSE crisis. RELATIVES OF the victims of "human BSE" recounted harrowing tales yesterday of medical dithering in diagnosing the disease, and huge variations - sometimes amounting to indifference by local health authorities - in the help given to terminally ill sufferers. "We found there is an eight-fold increase in the dispersal of the female mitochondrial DNA compared to the Y chromosome DNA of the male," he said.One explanation is thatwomen were often traded or abducted by neighbouring tribes looking for wives, with the result that females and their genes ended up travelling further and more often than men.Mark Stoneking, a scientist at Pennsylvania State University and an expert in the study of human migrations from DNA analysis, says the role of males in migration "has been greatly exaggerated", and the research questions teachings about "man the hunter".In the journal Nature Genetics, Dr Stoneking says: "An emphasis on 'women the gatherer' would more accurately indicate who really brings home the bacon in most traditional hunter-gathering societies.". Contrary to accepted wisdom, women and their movement from place to place had a greater influence than the nomadic male on the genetic mix of the global population. Mark Seielstad, a geneticist from the Harvard School of Public Health, working with Eric Minch and Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University in California, found that females have gone far further than anthropologists had previously thought in spreading genetic material around the world.Dr Seielstad looked at the mitochondrial DNA of human blood cells - which men and women inherit only from their mothers - and compared this with the DNA of the Y chromosome - which men only pass on to their sons.