excludepkgs not working with epel

[Dave]

Hello,
	I'm running CentOS 5.3 and have epel listed as one of my 3rd party
repos. One of the packages that i've customized for my environment which is
a vps is pure-ftpd. I do not want pure-ftpd to be fetched from epel or any
repo, so i've added:

excludepkgs=pure-ftpd*

to epel's repository definition. On the next yum update the excludepkgs is
not honored and yum atempts to download pure-ftpd again. Is there some
syntax i missed?
Thanks.
Dave.