The case of Growth Hormone
To date, more than a hundred cases of death have been registered in France in young people who were given growth hormone in childhood. Today, 16 years after the first death, the families of the victims are demanding justice at the trial that began in Paris. There are seven responsible medical workers in the dock. On Tuesday, February 5, they were charged with manslaughter.
According to the prosecution, their professional mistakes led to the infection of the victims with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the infamous "mad cow disease", a progressive neurodegenerative disease with a fatal outcome).
Since 1988, synthesized growth hormone has been used as a therapeutic drug to accelerate the growth of short children.
85-year-old Jean-Claude Jobe, the former head of the France-Pituitary association, who received a monopoly right from the state to produce the hormone and prescribe it to patients, is accused of manslaughter.
The defendants are also the former head of the production department at the Pasteur Institute, 85-year-old Fernand Drey, two hospital pharmacists, one responsible employee of the Ministry of Health, a female doctor who was entrusted with receiving the hormone, and another female doctor who is suspected of wrongly prescribing the hormone to the boy.
The first alarm sounded in December 1991, when the parents of 15-year-old Liasil, who died after seven years of treatment, filed a complaint with the court.
Like other parents (there were about a hundred of them) who gave the hormone to their children, Liasil's parents noticed that their son first developed a deterioration in vision and a decrease in mental abilities, and after a while he died.
The first articles on this topic appeared in the press. Successive health ministers appointed an internal investigation, after which the scale of the drama was outlined.
The investigation found that due to the increased demand, the France-Pituitary association increased the production of the hormone, while showing negligence and neglect of possible consequences: conclusion of contracts with high-risk institutions (departments of neurology, geriatrics, etc.), monetary rewards (in cash) to laboratory assistants for illegal sampling, risky methods of hormone extraction. Meanwhile, back in November 1984, the international community was informed about the death of a 21-year-old American. The following year, in the USA, Great Britain and about ten other countries, the method of hormone extraction was banned and replaced by the newly developed synthesis method.
These measures were ignored in France, where, until 1988, responsible managers were limited to tightening safety rules for sterilizing samples, without checking the results and without informing parents about the existing risk.
The Association of Victims of Growth Hormone (AVHC) has recorded 111 deaths.
The state did not listen to the opinion of the court and, acting in the name of "national solidarity", paid the victims 225 thousand euros in compensation for each fatal case plus various payments to the relatives of the deceased.
But the families insist that justice should have its say first of all. During the trial, the judges will listen to relatives, as well as about twenty experts, including Professor Luc Montagnier, who was one of the discoverers of the AIDS virus, and Nobel Prize winner Stanley Praziner.
In France, the court has already considered the "case of contaminated blood". The heads of the National Blood Transfusion Center (CNTS) were sentenced to several years in prison for using HIV-infected blood in the 1980s, despite the fact that the risk associated with AIDS was already known, AFP reports.
Translation: Boris Karpov, "Polar Star"
Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru06.02.2008