A frightening image of an arrogant and careless bureaucracy ruled by second-level councillors with no accountability and a heedless medical community that ignored health warnings emerged from the second day of France's "contaminated blood trial" yesterday. In five hours of mostly gentle questioning by judges, Mr Edmond Herve, the Socialist politician who served as junior minister for health in the mid-1980s, vehemently denied that he deliberately delayed systematic AIDS testing of blood stocks rather than accept a US-made test-kit over a French one.
Mr Herve also denied that he was responsible for France's failure to screen blood donors, blaming the media and doctors. When one of his subordinates signed a circular in 1983 recommending that blood donations from high-risk homosexuals, Haitians or people with multiple sexual partners be excluded, French newspapers denounced the measure as bigoted and racist.
Like his co-defendants - the former social affairs minister, Mrs Georgina Dufoix and the former prime minister, Mr Laurent Fabius - Mr Herve cites scientific uncertainty and the lack of a sense of urgency at the time as the main excuse for the public health catastrophe that has already killed more than 1,000 French people.
At least 3,400 other transfusion recipients and haemophiliacs are sero-positive as a result of the scandal.
Each time the defendants have been confronted with documented proof of allegations, they claimed to have been ignorant of their subordinates' reports, memos and discussions.
Thus Mr Herve and Mr Fabius deny being present at, or having seen the minutes, of a May 9th, 1985, ministerial meeting in Mr Fabius's office where it was recommended that registration of the US AIDS test be held up.
The AIDS epidemic had sparked a vicious scientific and commercial dispute because French researchers believed the US "discoverer" of the HIV virus had in fact stolen it from a French colleague.
Mr Herve yesterday also denied knowledge of a January 1985 internal memorandum that confirmed blood products for haemophiliacs were spreading the disease. Although a heat treatment known to kill the virus was available, the French government continued to distribute untreated stocks.
Once the heat treatment was adopted in October 1985, Mr Herve denied knowing that his ministry ordered contaminated stocks be administered to patients who were already sero-positive. "I never gave the order to use up the stocks!" he cried out in the courtroom.
Mr Herve is considered most at risk in the manslaughter trial.
He denied charges that he neglected his ministry in favour of local politics in Brittany, claiming he often worked in his Paris office until 11 p.m.
The investigative newspaper Le Canard Enchaine yesterday published a damning confidential Ministry of Health memo to Mr Herve's successor, saying that "it was known with certainty from 1983, beginning of 1984 that the virus was transmitted by blood donors".
Despite the risk, transfusions were still prescribed for minor problems such as jaundice or anaemia.
On August 2nd, 1985, a doctor in charge of a transfusion centre delivered a report proving a very high rate of AIDS and hepatitis B infection among prisoners. Yet more than five years passed before prisoners were stopped from giving blood.
Mr Herve said yesterday that he did not halt prison collections because he was not asked to.
"Responsible but not guilty", a phrase first used by Mrs Dufoix, has become the credo of the three defendants in the blood trial. When she was questioned yesterday, Mrs Dufoix said she was too busy running the three sub-ministries (including health) within her vast ministry of social affairs and being government spokeswoman to follow the AIDS question closely. Mr Fabius is to be questioned today.
