Relatives of a woman with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease filed a criminal accusation Tuesday with the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor's Office against two medical goods' suppliers.
It is the first criminal accusation involving CJD in Japan.
Takako Tani, 43, has been diagnosed with the disease and is in a persistent vegetative state. Her husband, Sanichi Tani, 48, who owns a ranch in Kosei, Shiga Prefecture, and the woman's elder brother, Shoichi Sasaki, 47, a farmer in Akita Prefecture, filed the accusation against a 73-year-old former president of Nippon BBM and the 40-year-old president of Nippon BSS.
Her relatives accuse the two of having continued to import dried dura mater from a German pharmaceutical company for five years from 1983, while knowing that transplants of the brain tissue could prove fatal. In 1988, the two firms supplied Otsu Shimin Hospital in Shiga Prefecture with the brain tissue. Tani contracted CJD after receiving a tissue transplant in January 1989, the relatives said.
Although the German company started sterilizing dura mater, the two Tokyo-based firms failed to recall the unsterilized tissue, they said. In March 1996, seven years after the transplant, Tani started showing symptoms of CJD -- fatigue, dementia and weak eyesight -- and fell into a coma within three months. The disease, which has no known cure, leads to death in one or two years.
In November 1996, the Tanis, with Takako as the plaintiff, filed a compensation suit seeking 90 million yen at the Otsu District Court against the two firms, the central government and the Otsu Municipal Government, which runs the public hospital.