Relatives of James-Bernard Murat, winegrower in Pujols, in the Bordeaux region, who died of pesticide-related cancer, hope to obtain redress. The legal battle to recognize the responsibility of sodium arsenite in the occupational disease of the winegrower, and more generally, of the companies that manufactured this pesticide, will start on Monday.
The winegrower’s family will file a complaint against X for “manslaughter” before the Public Health Center at the TGI in Paris. There will also be mention of “the failure to provide assistance, criminal abstention and the offense of deception”, according to the specialist lawyer François Lafforgue.
Died in December 2012, the winegrower had seen his cancer recognized as an occupational disease in February 2011. For 42 years, from 1958 to 2000, the man had worked with sodium arsenite, a phytosanitary product used in treatments against wood diseases and in particular esca, a vine disease caused by parasitic fungi.
If the pesticide has been banned in France since November 2001, the collateral damage of professionals who were exposed to it years before its ban are beginning to be known. For environmental associations such as Future Generations and Phyto-Victims, the dangerousness of arsenite was known long before it was banned: “the dangerousness of arsenite has been recognized since at least 1955, when the table of occupational diseases and related pathologies was created. to arsenic and its mineral compounds “.
Pesticides in the crosshairs of justice
The complaint “targets very clearly the firms which manufactured the product that my father bought as well as the State services, explains the daughter of the winegrower, Valérie Murat to AFP. I do not want my father to be dead for nothing. We deceived the peasants “.
This affair should also make it possible to alert “the farmers on the link between the pathologies which they can declare and the use of pesticides”, specify the groups in a press release.
The case of James-Bernard Murat is not isolated. A medical expertise was ordered to determine a possible link between the death of Denis Bibeyran, a wine worker who died of rare cancer in 2009, and the use of pesticides in his career.
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