PARIS (awp/afp) – After the Morhange talc affair which marked France in the 1970s, the country was shaken by other major health scandals.
Distilbene
Distilbene is the trade name of a synthetic hormone prescribed in France from 1950 to 1977 to pregnant women, in particular to prevent miscarriages.
This product is dangerous: girls exposed in utero have an increased risk of developing cancer of the vagina or cervix and their children are at risk of malformations.
At least 160,000 babies have been exposed in France to Distilbène. From the beginning of the 2000s, trials multiplied.
For the first time in 2011, the Versailles Court of Appeal recognized a link between Distilbène and disability in the third generation, granting the grandson of a woman treated with this product 1.7 million euros in damages. .
contaminated blood
In the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic spread. To avoid contamination by blood transfusion, a circular recommends avoiding blood donations from people at risk, drug addicts and homosexuals. But this text is poorly applied.
In addition, stocks of unheated blood products (heating inactivates HIV) continued to be sold until October 1985.
Result: hundreds of people are infected, especially hemophiliacs whose disease forces them to regular transfusions. The French Association of Hemophiliacs estimates that 1,350 have been infected with HIV, of which a thousand have died of AIDS.
The legal consequences deeply disappoint the victims. In 1993, the former director of the National Blood Transfusion Center Michel Garretta and his former director of development Jean-Pierre Allain were sentenced on appeal to four years in prison, two of which were closed.
In 1999, the Prime Minister at the time Laurent Fabius and the former Minister of Social Affairs Georgina Dufoix were acquitted by the Court of Justice of the Republic, while the former Secretary of State for Health Edmond Hervé was sentenced but released from punishment.
Growth hormone
Between 1983 and 1985, 1,698 children received treatment to promote their growth with injections of products contaminated with prion, a pathogen of Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (CJD), which destroys the nervous system.
Among them, 120 die of CJD. The judicial epilogue of the scandal is played out in 2016 after more than twenty years of investigation: the last two defendants are released, justice recognizing “faults” but no “responsible”.
PIP prostheses
Abnormal rupture rate and use of non-regulatory silicone gel: the breast implants of the French company PIP were withdrawn from the market in March 2010 by the Afssaps health security agency (later to become ANSM).
A few months later, 500 women wearing these prostheses filed a complaint. After the death by cancer of one of them, justice opens a judicial investigation.
The founder of the company Jean-Claude Mas was sentenced at the end of 2013 to four years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros for aggravated deception and fraud. He died in April 2019 at the age of 79, without having been imprisoned to serve his final sentence, the appeals having not all been exhausted.
Mediator
Substance classified among the amphetamines and mainly prescribed as an appetite suppressant, the Mediator was withdrawn from the market in France at the end of 2009 following alerts launched in particular by Dr Irène Frachon on its harmful effects on the heart valves.
In 2010, the drug agency Afssaps (now ANSM) estimated that more than 500 the number of deaths due to this drug from Servier laboratories. In 2011, the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs estimated that the withdrawal should have taken place in 1999.
After a long trial, the Paris Criminal Court condemns, in March 2021, the Servier laboratories for “aggravated deception” and “involuntary homicides and injuries” to a fine of 2.718 million euros, its ex-number 2 to four years suspended prison sentence (the boss Jacques Servier having died in 2014).
The Medicines Agency is also condemned for having “shown negligence and recklessness, in particular by delaying the suspension of the medicine”. Servier appealed.
Depakine
Antiepileptic from the Sanofi laboratory, Depakine is at the center of a health scandal that started in 2015 following malformations in the children of women under treatment during their pregnancy.
Sodium valproate (Depakine and derivatives) has been responsible since 1967 for malformations in 2,150 to 4,100 children and developmental disorders in 16,600 to 30,400 children, according to estimates by Health Insurance and the ANSM.
Sanofi is indicted for “manslaughter” in August 2020 and the ANSM for “injury and manslaughter by negligence” in November in the criminal part of the file.
ot/mw/gvy