A 34-year-old removal man died of CJD more than 15 years after an operation in which he was given infected tissue from a dead donor who had been secretly carrying the disease, a coroner said yesterday.

Simon Stratford, a father of four from St Neots, Cambridgeshire, was the victim of a rare surgical transfer of the disease that is believed only to have involved seven other Britons among 168 people worldwide.

He had needed a repair to his dura mater, a lining between the skull and the brain, when he had a benign but aggressive tumour removed at Addenbrooke's hospital, Cambridge, in September 1987.

Legal experts believe this was the first full inquest into such a case in the UK.

The coroner's verdict of medical misadventure may now be used by Mr Stratford's family to seek compensation from the manufacturers of the product used to carry out the repair, called a Lyodura patch, which contained the infected tissue.

Mr Stratford's wife Colleen said after the inquest that her husband, who weighed had 13 stone (83kg) had shrunk to about four stone as he battled CJD.

Between October 2002 and April 2003, when he died, the previously "laidback" man, first had problems sleeping, then lost feeling in his face and arm, and became withdrawn and angry as his condition deteriorated, losing his ability to swallow, walk and speak.

David Morris, the coroner for south and west Cambridge, sitting in Huntingdon, said Mr Stratford had recovered from the brain operation, but decided the origin of his disease "was the insertion of the Lyodura graft at the time of his operation".

Mrs Stratford, 37, said: "I am very satisfied. It is what my husband would have wanted. I promised to Simon I would do my best to get justice done for what happened to him."

The couple were married by a registrar at a friend's house five weeks before Mr Stratford died but they had been together 15 years.

Their children, three boys and a girl, are now 15, 13, 11 and eight.

David Body, of Irwin Mitchell, Mrs Stratford's solicitors, said: "The question now needs to be considered what further remedy lies in compensation against the manufacturers."

Mr Stratford was not a beef eater and the signature in brain tissue after his death did not suggest he had the human form of BSE. CJD comes in different forms, but its most common, known as sporadic CJD, affects about one in a million Britons each year.

Robert Will from the CJD surveillance unit, Edinburgh and John Collinge, of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, London, were among medical witnesses who felt the patch was responsible for iatrogenic CJD, the term used when the disease is spread by instruments or surgical procedures.

The alarm was raised on iatrogenic CJD in the US in 1987. Most cases have been in Japan and many linked to Lyodura, made by the German firm B Braun Melsungen.

Professor Will said the time lag between operations and the onset of symptoms in patients varied from 18 months to 22 years.

He told the inquest one research paper had suggested the risk of infection from processed dura mater in Japan may have been about one in 2,000.

Government advisers have suggested that the risk of infection in Britain from this should have almost disappeared since 1992. There were two alerts in 1987, a few weeks before Mr Stratford's operation, and in 1989. But these were before CJD hit the headlines because of the BSE crisis.

Other surgical transmissions have been caused by the use of human pituitary glands in human growth hormone, and there have been a handful of cases, three in England in the 1950s and one in France around 1980, linked to the use of contaminated surgical instruments.

Concerns were also raised about the use of potentially contaminated equipment at Middlesbrough general hospital in 2002, an incident revealed by the Guardian, but no iatrogenic cases have been reported so far.

The scare led to reminders on how instruments used in some exploratory brain operations should be quarantined.

The surgeon responsible for the operation, Richard Hatfield, now working in Cardiff, said he had used Lyodura and, even if he had known of the iatrogenic CJD alert, he probably would have still used the same procedure.

B Braun told the court that in the absence of batch records related to the operation "we are not able to confirm that Lyodura was used".