The boss of Teva France, a laboratory which is the subject of an investigation into the poor packaging of boxes of the diuretic Furosemide, indicates this Friday to now follow the human track.
“We know that on the technical and industrial side there is no problem. Now we are going to follow the human track, ”Erick Roche, boss of the French subsidiary of the pharmaceutical group Teva, said on Friday June 14 on RTL. Indeed, no major breach was detected by the four inspectors of the Medicines Agency (Ansm), at the end of two days of investigation in the Sens (Yonne) factory of Teva laboratories. To unravel the mystery of the packaging error of the boxes of Furosemide diuretic, which could be linked to three deaths and two hospitalizations, we must therefore look for responsibilities elsewhere.
Human error or malice are therefore officially part of the hypotheses. François Chast, head of the clinical pharmacy service at the Cochin-Hôtel Dieu hospital in Paris, was one of the first to evoke malevolence. “ It is not possible that within a batch there are tablets which are sometimes good sometimes bad, he had declared at the beginning of the week. These elements translate that at one point, it was a human hand that did what should not be done “
However, for the time being, the group “does not file a complaint”. And the boss added, “we are counting a lot on the gendarmes who were seized to help us understand what happened”. Because, as part of the preliminary investigation opened by the Paris prosecutor’s office, the gendarmes carried out, Thursday, June 13, a search of the premises of Teva in Sens. Oclaesp (Central Office for the Fight against Attacks on the Environment and Public Health) carried out this inspection with the gendarmes of the Dijon research section (Côte-d’Or) and the Sens research brigade . The investigation is open “for aggravated deception, homicides and unintentional injuries, endangering the life of others and administration of harmful substance”.
In addition, Erick Roche once again wished to reassure: “All the boxes that we recover are opened under the control of a bailiff,” he declared. Today, Friday June 14, we opened several hundred boxes but we have not yet found Zopiclone tablets in a box of Furosemide ”.
At the same time, the Toulouse public prosecutor’s office opened a new preliminary investigation on Thursday following the death of a man who was taking Furosemide. The 47-year-old man was found dead at his home. The Toulouse prosecutor, Michel Valet, however, was very cautious about a possible link between the death of this man and the problem of conditioning. ” We have a death that is linked to a health problem. As among the boxes of medicine in the possession of the person concerned there was the medicine which is currently being talked about a lot, everything is being checked, ”said the prosecutor. An autopsy and toxicological expertise will be carried out “to remove the doubt”. This is the fourth preliminary investigation opened since last weekend following the suspicious death of a person taking Furosemide.
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