Extracts from Reuters postings on Friday, Nov. 17, 2000 (you are encouraged to visit the their archives to read more):
French Lawsuit Filed As Mad Cow Scare Grips
PARIS (Reuters) - The families of two French victims of the human variant of mad cow disease took their case to court on Friday as Italy slapped a partial ban on imports of French beef in a widening consumer scare over tainted meat.
The legal action could eventually see officials from Britain, France and the European Union placed in the dock on poisoning and manslaughter charges for failing to take action to stem the epidemic among cattle and its transmission to humans.
"People who smoke and drink do so by their own choice," said Dominique Eboli, whose 19-year-old son Arnaud is suspected of having the fatal, brain-wasting disease known as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (nvCJD).
"All my son did was eat and he is going to die."
The other victim, Laurence Duhamel, died last February.
The "complaint against persons unknown," the first of its kind in France, will trigger a judicial inquiry to establish whether there is a case for a full legal investigation and who might be brought to the courts as the alleged culprits.
It was filed in Paris amid growing consumer panic over mad cow disease in France, where authorities banned suspect animal feed on Tuesday and have taken T-bone steak and other beef dishes off menus in restaurants and schools.
The scare, reminiscent of Britain's mad cow crisis in the mid-1990s, broke out last month after three French supermarket chains removed beef from their shelves over fears it might be contaminated by mad cow disease.
Italy, which imports around one million head of cattle a year from France, announced a partial ban on French beef on Friday in response to the scare.
NEW CASE SUSPECTED
"We are blocking the import of adult cattle with an age above 18 months," Italian Farm Minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio said. "There is (also) a block on the import of meat-on-the bone which is the same as that decided by the French government."
Spain took similar action last week and Germany said on Friday that it could not rule out measures of its own.
Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), is believed to have been introduced into cattle by feeding them ground up carcasses, bone and entrails from other animals.
The French farm ministry announced on Friday that it had recently discovered four new cases of BSE in the country, lifting the number of infected cows found so far this year to 103 against just 30 detected in the whole of 1999.
The jump in new cases is explained largely by the adoption of more rigorous testing methods and France's BSE record pales into insignificance beside Britain's tally, which stands at some 179,000 confirmed cases, including 850 this year.
Scientists have drawn a link between BSE and nvCJD.
At least 80 people in Britain and two people in France have died from the new variant of the disease. French media said on Friday that another probable case had come to light at a Paris hospital, but medical authorities later denied that the patient in question was suffering from nvCJD.
Several writs have been issued in Britain against the Health Ministry over the deaths, but the claims have been put on ice until details of government compensation packages are finalized.
CHIRAC WANTS EU ACTION
A spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair declined to comment on the French lawsuit, saying there had been no formal notification of any action against the British government.
The deposition accuses the British and French authorities and the Brussels-based European Commission of passing the buck through a decade of inaction.
It focuses on the period between 1986, the year when the BSE cattle disease was first identified, and 1996 when scientists drew a link with the human variant.
French President Jacques Chirac said he sympathized with the families who have brought the suit.
"The recourse to justice in this case is a sort of cry for help," Chirac said in the Correze region of southern France, where he was on a fence-mending visit to cattle farmers (emphasis added).
He promised aid to producers whose livelihoods are threatened by plunging beef consumption and said he regretted the unilateral steps Italy had taken.
The leader of France's main farm union, the FNSEA, said he was "scandalized" by Italy's decision.
"France holds the presidency of the European Union until the end of the year. It should put its foot down and denounce this sort of decision," the FNSEA's Luc Guyau told Reuters.
France is seeking an EU-wide battle plan against BSE, including a ban on bone and meat meal feeds for all livestock and pets and systematic testing procedures for the disease.
"Certain countries like ours are testing to find the illness, to see where the danger is. Naturally, when you seek, you find," Chirac said.
"Other countries in the EU are not searching. When they don't search, they naturally don't find any infected animals."