France's Spreading Blood Scandal

...Financial shenanigans are often deplored, then shrugged off by electorates...

...A separate inquiry into the transfusion system by a Senate commission found that "in the context of a near-monopoly and almost total autonomy, certain rules of medical ethics were forgotten...

...the High Court would be reserved solely for treason cases...

...But as the court recalled, in 1983 it was already public knowledge that the aids virus could be transmitted through blood and semen...

...As the affair has unwound, people have been shocked to learn that, once processed, the blood they donate becomes a lucrative commodity...

...The document recommended that blood collections be avoided in prisons, where high rates of homosexuality and drug addiction are common...

...The affair may, in fact, bring about constitutional reform...

...If so, the judges themselves will carry it out...

...Mitterrand backs most of Fabius' proposals, but feels that prior to any changes the existing constitutional process must be adhered to...

...In the interim, he wants a "jury of honor" to be established to investigate the three ministers, and is convinced it will clear them of involvement in the blood scandal...

...ACCUSATIONS AT THE TOP France's Spreading Blood Scandal BY JANICE VALLS-RUSSELL Paris A formal apology by President Francois Mitterrand several weeks ago could not quiet what has become a national scandal here: It is now evident that in 1985 French health officials allowed the distribution of blood known to be contaminated with the HIV virus...

...Michel Garretta, former head of France's National Blood Transfusion Center, and three colleagues were brought to trial this past summer for their role in the matter...

...Fabius himself is reported to have told friends, "There are times when I look at myself in a mirror and wonder if I'm unknowingly a murderer...

...A French drug company, Merieux, continued exporting them to southern Europe and northern Africa nearly to the end of the year...

...As a result, tainted blood products remained on the market in France until the autumn of 1985...

...Garretta, the prosecution pointed Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...

...Whatever the charges Parliament finally agrees on, the Supreme Court will decide whether there are grounds for proceeding with an investigation...

...The Court's political dimension is what Fabius most objects to...

...That "half-measure," as Paugam calls it, was compounded by the tardy introduction of a screening test for donors...

...Further, the doctors' trial revealed that, in this case anyway, the health bureaucracy's financial considerations prevailed over its concern for human lives...

...Since the start of the Fifth Republic in 1958 it has never been convened, and before that the only trials it ever held were for treason...

...The former Prime Minister, who insists he was more concerned than most about the threat posed by aids, has called for a change in the Constitution that would have ministers tried in ordinary courts...

...at least 1,200 of them are known to be carrying the virus...

...One of us is dying every week," says Edmond-Luc Henry, president of the Hemophiliacs Association...

...Herve claims he was in the dark until June 1985, but evidence at the doctors' trial showed that, long before, his main adviser was aware of the risks being taken...

...Garretta was given the toughest sentence —four years in prison and a $100,000 fine...

...On October 23, the proceedings ended with mild verdicts...

...Sabine Paugam, the hemophiliacs' lawyer, noted that early in 1985 the U.S...

...He has responded to all this by bitterly recalling that in 1985, when he appeared before the Assembly to announce the adoption of screening tests, "the rumor went round Paris that I was a homosexual...

...Within the French health system, which links private practices, laboratories and clinics with national research facilities and state hospitals, the Transfusion Center was an autonomous institution...

...Called as a witness in this summer's trial, he claimed he was not informed that contaminated blood products were being distributed...

...This has become a sarcastic catchphrase in France...

...That does not explain why Abbott was denied an import license for its test...

...Come March, though, many voters may well be reluctant to again entrust his Socialist Party with their fate...

...Dufoix admits that given her position at the time she feels "responsible" for what happened, "but not guilty...

...Mitterrand's invoking the High Court is no doubt a triumph of ethics over the coverup style of previous Presidents...

...The center has since been brought under government control and is awaiting the reforms being developed by the present Health Minister, Bernard Kouchner...

...out, was bent on transforming it into a slick, profit-making enterprise...

...Government officials apparently delayed granting the American Abbott Laboratories an import license for an approved procedure in order to give the Pasteur Institute, France's leading laboratory, time to develop its own method...

...Far from settling the controversy, the trial let loose a flood of suspicions and accusations...

...The victims, meanwhile, also believing the ministers were at fault, lobbied actively for a special inquiry...

...The one who was accused then of moving too fast is now accused of having moved too slowly...

...To date, the French Medical Association has stripped only Garretta of his right to practice...

...Since then, 300 hemophiliacs who were treated with a clotting factor from the tainted supply, and 700 other individuals who received transfusions in the course of operations, have died of aids...

...if the Center-Right opposition has its way, they may face counts of manslaughter through negligence...

...The former ministers almost certainly will have to answer accusations of what the Senate commission calls "administrative inertia...

...Others complain that focusing so much attention on the victims has obscured the "thousands of lives saved by transfusions" in the same period...

...Besides being the focal point of the hemophiliacs' distress, the convicted doctors' resentment and the opposition's gleeful opprobrium, Fabius, who is Jewish, has also been the butt of nasty anti-Semitic cartoons published by the far-Right...

...On November 12, some 40 prominent specialists published a petition declaring that in 1985 not enough information was available on aids to justify withdrawing the infected blood...

...A doctor himself, Kouchner has denounced the affair as a consequence of medical and administrative "laxity and irresponsibility...

...She says, too, that she welcomes the opportunity to appear before the High Court and to "repeat once again what I've been saying consistently" AstoFabius, decisions on blood transfusion policy are unlikely to have reached his desk...

...The President's decision was particularly painful: Fabius, today the leader of the Socialist Party, is a personal favorite...

...Evidence produced in court proved the contaminated blood was used through most of 1985, even after a means of purifying the supply had been devised...

...The three former ministers, in their defense, have also maintained that seven years ago health officials lacked reliable information...

...The legislators are currently trying to determine whether charges indeed should be brought against the three former ministers...

...Should the ministers ultimately be cleared, their careers could be destroyed anyway by the insidious effects of suspicion...

...Did the ministers know what was going on...

...Once it is completed, the case can be forwarded to the High Court, which is actually a panel of Deputies and Senators...

...Yet only on July 30 of that year did the French government take action, and even then, rather than prohibit untreated blood products, it merely decreed that their costs would no longer be reimbursed by health services...

...The governing Socialists, sensing what looks like an electoral death-blow in the national balloting due in March ("this is our Irangate," Kouchner recently said), have closed ranks around their besieged party leader...

...and Germany banned blood products that had not undergone a heating process to neutralize the HI V virus...

...On November 10, shortly after he issued his apology, Mitterrand called on France's Parliamentarians to convene the High Court of Justice, the sole body empowered to try government ministers...

...But the blood scandal is one of life and death, a potential threat to all of France...

...Thus it seems Fabius and his ministers will have to resign themselves to a probable hearing in the High Court...

...For one strategy of the defense lawyers was to argue that the accused were scapegoats...

...Such matters apparently do involve the Prime Minister's office...

...In their view, the responsible parties included Edmond Herve, the Minister of Health at the time the blood was in use, Georgina Dufoix, then Minister of Social Affairs, and Laurent Fabius, the Prime Minister from 1984-86...

...For the ex-ministers, appearing in the Court would be especially ignominious...

...Many physicians, however, have sided with the four who were tried...

...Moreover, the Senate report observes that, until August 1985, the medical authorities as well as the health and penitentiary administrations largely ignored a government directive issued in June '83...