It was in 1997 that the judicial inquiry into the importation of British cattle and animal meal was launched in France, following the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE more commonly known as mad cow disease). Over the course of the investigation, 4 animal feed factory managers were indicted in this case, some for deception or falsification.
Sixteen years later, at the end of an interminable investigation, the investigation is closed. The Paris prosecutor’s office requested a general dismissal, according to a judicial source cited in The Parisian. The four people prosecuted (one of whom is deceased) should be cleared if the investigating judge of the Paris public health center decides to follow these requisitions.
Mad cow: the infectious agent has not disappeared
Mad cow disease today looks like a distant nightmare. But while the transmission of the disease from animals to humans has mainly been established in the 1990s, experts believe that the infectious agent is far from over. To prove it, a team of scientists examined samples taken over the past twelve years from anonymous people of all ages in British hospitals. The researchers extrapolated the results obtained to the population of the United Kingdom and arrived at the prevalence of one in 2,000 people probably carrying the agent (the famous prion) responsible for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
In France, the National Institute for Sanitary Surveillance (Invs), which continues to monitor the number of cases of Creutfeld-Jakob disease each year, estimates that 112 people were affected by mad cow disease in 2012 and 72 in 2013. Since 1996, 27 people have died from the disease: 12 men and 15 women, aged 19 to 58.