SIX health officials accused of killing 117 children by treating them with a growth hormone tainted with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease walked free from a court in Paris yesterday.
The French doctors and pharmacists were cleared of charges of "serious negligence" over the injecting of children with growth problems with hormones collected from the infected pituitary glands of human bodies.
Families of the victims reacted angr
ily as the not guilty verdicts were handed down. Jeanne Goerrian, the president of the victims' association, called the ruling a "scandal", adding: "Who are these all-powerful people who take the law into their own hands and kill, and escape all punishment?"
The controversial judgment came after a marathon 11-month trial, which began last February. The case centred on a 20-year programme begun in 1968 that treated 1,700 children suffering from a deficiency in the secretion of growth hormones.
But the programme was axed in 1988 when doctors discovered that some children were falling critically ill. This was followed by a 16-year investigation that led to the trial.
During months of testimony, the court heard that the accused allegedly ignored medical safety rules by using corpses from neurological and geriatric wards that were already potentially infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD. The cases did not involve the "mad cow" variant of the disease.
CJD is caused by naturally occurring proteins, called prions, that can mutate and deform, eating away at brain matter.
The results include radical personality changes and dementia, along with loss of balance, hand tremors and crippling leg pains. Death usually comes within three months of the onset of symptoms.
After the deaths began occurring from 1988, the French government did not wait for the trial's outcome to pay out damages, with each family receiving at least £215,000.
Experts say that other people treated under the programme could fall victim to the disease in coming years.
The accused, now in their seventies and eighties, included Fernand Dray, former laboratory chief at the Pasteur Institute, which purified the hormones, and Marc Mollet and Henri Cerceau of the central hospital pharmacy, which turned them into medicine form. The others are Jacques Dangoumau, a former health ministry official; Elisabeth Mugnier, a paediatrician; and a doctor, Micheline Gourmelen.
A seventh defendant, Jean-Claude Job, the former head of the association authorised to source the hormones, died mid-way through the trial, aged 85, after asking for forgiveness.
After yesterday's verdicts, François Honnorat, the victims' lawyer, said: "It is a judicially absurd and socially dangerous ruling. I shall be consulting with the families, many of whom are already talking about launching an appeal."
The public prosecutor had asked for suspended sentences for three accused and the acquittal of three others, saying investigators had failed to establish their guilt.
The court ruling said: "The investigation did not provide confirmation that those who helped to make and distribute the growth hormone were aware in 1980 that it posed a risk."
A defence lawyer, Benoit Chabert, said after the ruling: "Just because there is pain does not mean there is a crime."
BACKGROUND
THE international community was first alerted to a possible link between human growth hormones and CJD in 1984, with the death of a 21-year-old American man.
Britain, the United States and a dozen other countries all banned hormones extracted from pituitary glands the following year, using a new synthetic variant instead.
France meanwhile continued with the old method of extracting hormones from human bodies until 1988.
The full article contains 598 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
