Trial of Doctors Who Indirectly Killed 110 Children Begins in France
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
PARIS — Seven doctors and pharmacists went on trial in Paris yesterday for indirectly causing the deaths of 110 children by injecting them with growth hormone tainted with the human form of mad cow disease.
About 200 family members, all plaintiffs, packed the courtroom as the judge read out the names and dates of death of their relatives in a trial that has taken almost 17 years to come to court.
The defendants are accused of manslaughter, deception, and causing intentional injury in administering growth hormones to almost 1,700 children in the 1980s. The defendants operated a network across France and Eastern Europe, in which pituitary glands were removed from the brains of corpses. The glands often came from people who had died of cancer, brain diseases, or infectious illnesses and were crushed together to make the growth hormone. Many of those still alive face the prospect of one day contracting the incurable Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which causes rapid dementia and death and can lie dormant for up to 40 years.
