Creutzfeldt-Jakob: death in Toulouse that upsets research and worries laboratories

After the shock, the worry and the questions. The death on November 4 from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease of a technician from the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (Inrae), who had worked in Toulouse in contact with infected biological tissues by prions (yesterday’s La Dépêche) upsets the entire scientific community, which had already been marked by the first death, on June 17, 2019 in Jouy-en-Josas (Yvelines), of a 33-year-old laboratory technician.

Complaints after a first death in 2019

Émilie Jaumain, assistant engineer in CDD at the virology and immunology research unit of INRAE, assigned to the team in charge of research on prions, was diagnosed in April 2019 with this deadly and incurable disease of which she had felt the first symptoms a few months earlier. Nine years earlier, she had become infected by slashing her thumb with material used to cut the brains of mice infected with strains of human prions. Several investigations are underway to determine the circumstances of the contamination of the young woman whose relatives have filed a complaint for “manslaughter” and “endangering the lives of others. At the same time, they appealed to the Paris administrative court for an expertise to be carried out, an expertise which came up against a lack of cooperation from INRAE, whose responsibility is likely to be engaged.

A second report in Toulouse in July 2020

One year after this first tragedy, last July, we again discovered Creutzfeld-Jakob disease on a Toulouse laboratory assistant retired from INRAE, who is believed to have been contaminated, too, by handling prions. This case of potential contamination led the Ministry of Research and several research institutes – Inrae, the National Institute for Health and Medical Research (Inserm), the National Agency for Food Safety, environment and work (ANSES), the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) – to suspend at the end of July “as a precaution all their research and development work. experimentation relating to prion diseases, for a period of three months. “” The moratorium period is taken advantage of by the establishments to reassess all the safety measures in their laboratories, taking into account the analysis of the possible sources of exposure to the prion of the sick person “, specifies the ministry .

Investigations are then initiated to “study the possibility of a link between the observed case and the person’s former professional activity. »On September 27, a joint inspection mission was entrusted in particular to the General Inspectorate of Education, Sport and Research (IGESR) and to the General Council for Food, Agriculture and Rural Areas ( CGAAER). The two structures had already submitted a report after the death of Emilie Jaumain in the fall of 2020, with seven recommendations that remained a dead letter …

Extension of the moratorium on prion research

On October 26, during a health, safety and working conditions committee (CHSCT) of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, the staff representatives unanimously asked Minister Frédérique Vidal ” to finally take the measure of the gravity of the situation and to stop shirking its responsibilities ”. Pending the publication of the report of this second inspection mission, the five research organizations decided, on October 27, in agreement with the Minister, to extend the moratorium until the end of this year.

It is in this context that the death of the Toulouse researcher, whose identity we do not yet know, who worked in a mixed Inrae-Veterinary School of Toulouse unit, was announced on Tuesday. Like Emilie Jaumain, she could have cut herself during her work in 2004 or 2005 according to union sources. It will obviously be necessary to determine if she was the victim of this occupational exposure, of a genetic or sporadic form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or if she was infected after ingestion of meat contaminated by the agent of spongiform encephalopathy. bovine (BSE, mad cow disease).

Beyond the human tragedy, there is the question of the safety and working conditions of laboratories and their material and personnel resources, but also the need to list all the incidents that have occurred in recent years, given the incubation period. of the disease which can be very long.