French court delivers verdict in human growth hormone scandal

In what has been surely yet another example of the wheels of French justice turning slowly - very slowly - a French court on Wednesday "cleared" six defendants who had been accused of gross negligence and involuntary manslaughter.

The case concerned the deaths of 117 people who had been treated with infected growth hormones in the 1980s - growth hormones that had been taken from human corpses.

The first victim died in 1991 at the age of 18 and the last in August 2007 at the age of 29, although the group representing the victims' families, l'Association des Victimes de l'Hormone de croissance (the French Association of Growth Hormone Victims, AVHC) maintains that the most recent death was that of a man on Christmas day.

Those who had brought the case, were the families who had sought treatment for their children’s below-normal growth patterns, but instead lost their loved ones to an agonising death from Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome (CJD).

And just how slowly the wheels of French justice really can turn is reflected in the length of time it took for the case to be heard and a ruling to be handed down.

It took almost 18 years before the trial finally opened in February last year.

In the dock were seven doctors and chemists – now mostly retired - from Pasteur Institute and France Hypophyse.

After hearing four months of testimony, the court then took another seven months to deliver its decision, during which one of the defendants died at the age of 85.

The court's ruling on Wednesday was that "it had not been established that the defendants involved were aware at the time of the risks patients were being exposed to in contracting CJD."

But as far as the AVHC was concerned, families of victims had been misled and ignored over the years. They had argued that they had been subjected to deceit and flagrant disregard for what should have been considered norms of ethical medical practice, even at the time.

When they questioned some of the symptoms their children were displaying or even started suggesting the possibility themselves of CJD, they were at best fobbed off with excuses, or at worst completely ignored.

United States researchers at the time had already alerted their French counterparts of the risks that might be associated with using growth hormones extracted from corpses. They preferred to follow the practice of using synthetically manufactured hormones – now a medical standard.

But for some reason, the French ignored the warning and compounded their error with unacceptable procedures such as extracting, maintaining and distributing the growth hormone in conditions far from sterile and sometimes taken from putrefying corpses.

Without knowing it the parents, rather than providing a solution to their children’s below-normal growth pattern, were in fact allowing them to be injected for years on a daily basis with the very hormone that would prove to kill them.

The defence of the accused - all of whom had pleaded not guilty - was that there had been no knowledge at the time of the potential dangers involved.

Despite Wednesday's ruling, the case is probably far from being over, certainly not as far as Jeanne Goerrian, the head of the AVHC is concerned.

"For our children who died, for our dead husbands and wives, we cannot let this go unpunished," she said.

Over 1,600 children were treated under the hormone program, and the AVHC fears that many more deaths from CJD could occur over the coming years.

The Paris prosecutor will challenge the verdict for three of the remaining six defendants, while a lawyer representing the victims' families will ask the justice minister, Rachida Dati, to force an appeal.