Innocent of Malicious Intent

Six health officials in France have been cleared of malfeasance in the deaths of one hundred and seventeen people who died a horrible, untimely death because of a deadly pathology they were introduced to through the auspices of those same doctors. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is a dreadful, insidious, and deadly disease which robs infected people of their physical functionality, then their cerebral function, leading to coma, and death.

As children, the hundred and seventeen people who died as a result of the ministrations of these physicians, were treated with growth hormones that were horribly contaminated. Those contaminated prions, over the course of many years caused the gradual onset of a form of what is better known as "mad cow disease", more familiar to the public after people in Britain, exposed to contaminated meat products from cows fed with brain matter and offal from ill animals, died horribly.

The hormones these children were infected with had been taken from the pituitary glands of human cadavers in the 1980s, using corpses from neurological and geriatric wards that had specialized in treating serious contagious diseases. How the potential to further infect others by using obviously contaminated materials from corpses could have been overlooked by these medical practitioners is mind-boggling in its lack of oversight.

The primary focus of offering medical treatment to ailing people, is to ensure that in the process the attending physician, in selecting a mode of treatment, a therapeutic protocol, after satisfying due diagnosis, would not result in harm to the patient. Within the Western world, medical practitioners sign on to an ancient term of reference, a pledge called the Hippocratic Oath, whose shorthand advice is "do no harm".

Hippocrates' axiom of initial intent for any responsible physician responding to the health needs of a patient made the doctor's obligation to his patient obvious: "As to diseases, make a habit of two things...to help, or at least, to do no harm." In other words, emphasizing the primary necessity of due diligence. To ensure that whatever trajectory the healing process undertaken, the prime focus was that harm be averted.

"For our children who died, for our dead husbands and wives, we cannot let this go unpunished" pledged the head of the French Association of Growth Hormone Victims. The Paris prosecutor in this case plans to appeal the verdict handed down for Fernand Dray, 86, former laboratory chief at the Pasteur Institute that purified the hormones; Marc Mollet, 84, of France's central hospital pharmacy, which turned them into medicine form; and pediatrician Dr. Elizabeth Mugnier, 59.

Louis Pasteur would turn over in his grave. It was his life-saving experiments in neutralizing harmful organisms through identifying the process whereby he demonstrated microorganisms evolve from other microorganisms - contaminating living creatures - that allowed medical science to successfully isolate and contain these deadly organisms. It would appear that familiarity with process, with cause and effect, puzzlingly resulted in due care being given short shrift in this case.

Another defendant in this notorious case, before he died, begged the victims' families for forgiveness. He was obviously aware that the neglect of the medical-health authorities in this miserable case in ensuring that their involvement in creating a safe and reliable product was not adequately safeguarded. French authorities, irrespective of the trial and its conclusion paid out damages to the families of each of the victims.

Grief is never assuaged by the awarding of funds in lieu of any other kind of recompense for such a monumental loss as a human life. But death is not a reversible health condition. Recognition of fault in inadequately analyzing the potential for damage in using contaminated materials, consigning the recipients to a a lethal degenerative brain disorder and then assigning an appropriate penalty, is society's way of giving closure to victims.

Denying responsibility for unpardonable actions resulting in untimely deaths serves the narrow interests of a cadre of professionals whose responsibility to the public was not followed to its needed conclusion. Taking the judicial decision not to hold these professionals to the basic standard of their profession based on the court's finding that those involved were not aware of the risk of infection through their prescribed treatment ignores the reality and gravity of professional responsibility.

Little wonder the families of the victims greeted the verdict with anger and astonishment, vowing to carry on in their search for justice and relief from the anguish of not being allowed to reach closure by the offending medical professionals not being held to account for their decisions and actions.