REPORTING. Dead researcher of Creutzfeldt-Jakob: emotion at the National Veterinary School of Toulouse
The deceased laboratory assistant worked in one of the many buildings on the Toulouse National Veterinary School campus. In his service, silence has prevailed since the news was announced. The agents ensure that all precautions were taken, and that no leakage of prions is possible.
It is a one-story brick building, which stretches lengthwise. In front, a paved and covered promenade, which leads to another building under construction. Behind, the Touch river delimits the immense plain of the national veterinary school, one of the four in France, located in the far west of Toulouse. Built at the end of the 1960s, the campus has around twenty pavilions, covering more than 40 hectares, which provide training for future veterinarians, as well as research in the fields of animal biology, in partnership with INRAE, the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment.
This is where the laboratory technician who died on November 4 from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease worked for several years. She had been retired from the establishment for several years.
“Building 10.1, Contagious Diseases (DRC), Microbiology (1st floor)”, can we read on a red sign, hung on the facade. Inside, a secure door, that of the Joint Research Unit Inrae / Veterinary School of Toulouse, called “IHAP” (Host interactions pathogens).
The staff, researchers, doctoral students and technicians, remain silent on the affair that shakes the campus. “Out of respect for the deceased,” the director, François Schelcher, told us, referring us to the INRAE communication service.
Some of his colleagues, later, will be a little more talkative. “A committee of experts passed not long ago and we are awaiting their final report,” slips one of them, on condition of anonymity. In these laboratories, scientists manipulate prions, infectious agents that are found naturally in different animal species. They are less than 1000 scientists in the world working on the specialty.
“Symptoms 10, 15 or 20 years later”
Could the technician have been contaminated and develop Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the course of her profession? “It is not an acute infection, the symptoms appear ten, fifteen or twenty years after the potential contaminations. It’s long and complicated, we are not on a conventional agent, ”explains a second member of the unit. Could she have been contaminated by cutting herself in the mid-2000s, as some union sources claim? “The routes of contamination are difficult to envision. The British had been working on this when the mad cow crisis was highlighted in the 1980s, with the first contaminations following the consumption of contaminated meat. Lots of European regulations have since been adopted to ban a certain type of product ”. Can prions “leak” out of the structure? “No, it is not a virus, it is not transmitted by the respiratory tract”, reassures the researcher.
“No accident had been mentioned when we learned of this case at the end of last July”, indicates the communication service of INRAE. Who admits however: “According to Public Health France, our agent was likely to reach a new variant form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, resulting from a possible exposure to a strain of infectious prions”.
The CGT union of Inrae, requested by “La Dépêche”, all demands in a press release that “people who have worked for the past 20 years on the prions identified as quickly as possible, and that their state of health be checked and monitored”.