Specialist doctors from throughout North East England were sent to her aid in a desperate bid to help.

Meanwhile, her family kept a bedside vigil as the Hartlepool grandmother-of-ten fought for life at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough.

She lost her brave battle on Boxing Day 2006 - just four days after being taken to hospital.

Her inquest recorded a verdict of natural causes linked to bronchopneumonia and sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Mrs Winship's sobbing daughter Sharon McKenna, 39, told the Mail: "We still want answers to questions. We have had no closure.

"We want to be tested and see if we have got it."

Family members say medical experts told them Mrs Winship contracted CJD from contaminated meat which may have lain dormant in her system for up to 30 years.

Sharon said: "If it has lay dormant in my mam and she died of it, we ate the same dinners as her."

Sharon has remained a prisoner in her own Lealholme Road home ever since the death of her mother. She says she can not face the outside world and has banned anyone in her home from eating beef.

The jobless mother-of-three added: "We want to know if we can get CJD and why we were not allowed to say goodbye to my mam when she was in her coffin."

"We wanted to have an open coffin and say goodbye but we had to have the lid closed."

Ann Winship – a former Cameron's Brewery beer bottler – was also a great grandmother of three and had already beaten cancer.

Grieving husband Tommy, 60, of Seaton Lane, Hartlepool, said his wife began to lose weight and suffered minor fits three months before her death.

But two weeks before Christmas 2006 her condition rapidly deteriorated and the fits became more severe.

He said his wife told medics she "had started hallucinating and her mind was going.

"About two weeks before she died, she started going stiff and funny. It got severe and I phoned the doctor up, took her down Hartlepool hospital and the next day she was transferred to James Cook.

"When we first went in there they couldn't fathom out why she had lost so much weight. I thought it was the cancer come back.

"She was sedated from the day she went in until the day she died."

Her family kept a bedside vigil as doctors tried to find out a cause of Ann's illness.

Specialists eventually diagnosed that they believed she was suffering from CJD.

She sadly died four days after being taken into hospital, leaving her family distraught.

Mr Winship wept as he described how he had to sign consent forms, agreeing that no attempt would be made to bring his wife back to life.

"I was told that trying to bring her back would put her through hell."

He said he also signed forms which allowed experts to take parts of his wife's brain for analysis at hospitals as far away as the USA.

Mr Winship, a retired shot blaster and sprayer, would have celebrated 40 years of marriage to Ann this year. He said: "I am damned, it is as simple as that. I don't bother going out any more."

Daughter Sharon described her mother as a fighter who had already battled back from throat cancer.

She said her mother spent most of her time in hospital asleep. "She was put on a side ward for her own dignity. It was horrible to see her like that."

Sharon said her mum, in the days before she went to hospital and when she started showing signs of the disease, "would stand up and go off to one side. She wouldn't know who we were. She deteriorated that quickly".

She added: "I have never left the house since. I don't know why that is but I won't leave."