SEVEN French doctors and pharmacists went on trial in Paris yesterday charged with the manslaughter of 111 children infected with a human variant of mad cow disease, 16 years after the first victim of their alleged negligence died.
They are accused of ignoring warnings and obscuring the risks from growth hormones which prosecutors say were collected from pituitary glands of corpses in hospitals specialising in infectious diseases and neurological disorders.
Experts say t
he glands may have been infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), which attacks the brain, causing dementia and death.
Over half the deaths from CJD caused by growth hormones occurred in France and victims' families hope the trial will throw light on why.
If found guilty the defendants, who are mostly in their 70s and 80s, face up to ten years in jail and fines of up to 150,000 (£112,000). All plead not guilty. The former head of the laboratory at the Pasteur Institute that purified the hormones, Fernand Dray, 85, is also charged with accepting bribes from exporters of the glands.
Bernard Fau, one of the lawyers representing 200 civil plaintiffs, described Dray's laboratory as "a miniscule slum, a sort of sordid back kitchen". It was where all the pituitary glands collected in France ended up for processing.
Dray contacted a scientist in Belgium who furnished him with glands from Bulgaria – allegedly giving Dray a 5 per cent cut on each order. Luc Montagnier, the French scientist who identified the Aids virus, told colleagues at the institute as early as 1980 that the hormone they were extracting could be a carrier of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but he was ignored.
The other official at the centre of the case is Professor Jean-Claude Job, former head of the France Pituitary Gland Association, which had a monopoly on collecting the hormone.
Prof Job, who is now 85, is accused of failing to respect rules during the extraction of glands "carried out in numerous cases by hospital staff without any medical competence, during which time he continued to reassure (patients and relatives] of the absence of any risk".
Glands were removed via the nose by untrained staff, increasing the risk of also removing contaminated brain matter. The court is expected to hear shocking evidence of glands removed with anything that came to hand, including curtain rods and heating pipes.
Jeanne Goerrian, president of a victims' association, said as she headed into court: "We feel deeply moved. It is as if our children were here watching."
Her son, Eric, died from CJD in 1994 at the age of 24.
The trial is expected to last four months.
