As France's scare over mad cow disease intensified yesterday, the families of two victims of the human version, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), filed suit against Britain, France and the EU for failing to take steps to contain the epidemic.
The writ, the first in France since bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) broke out there nine years ago, targets Britain for persisting in exporting potentially contaminated bone-meal even after it was banned for domestic use in 1988. Court officials said it could lead to a judicial investigation into criminal charges of "poisoning, homicide and endangering life".
Beef sales in France are down by 40 per cent, and its biggest export market, Italy, yesterday said it was stopping imports of live animals and beef on the bone and Austria banned live animal imports.
Relatives of Mr Laurence Duhamel, who died in February aged 36, and Mr Arnaud Eboli (19), who is seriously ill with vCJD, presented the suit at the civil court in Paris in the name of the Association of Victims of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
"Arnaud was definitely infected by eating infected meat. Our son is dying. We want steps to be taken so that this never happens again," his mother said.
"When an animal is sick, the state helps the farmer. For human beings there is nothing. The only way to do something is to go to the courts," said Mr Jean Duhamel, Laurence's brother.
The writ said "agents of British institutions" bore a heavy responsibility for "authorising the mass export of animal meal, which they recognise as being the main source of contamination".
Meat-meal and bone-meal, made from ground-up carcasses, is held to be the main vector for BSE, which can lead to vCJD. In a landmark official report on BSE in Britain last month the former agriculture minister, Mr John Gummer, was quoted as asking in 1989 why the meal was still going to the Continent.
A British government spokeswoman said the BSE report found "no criminal case to answer".
The victims' families also blamed the European Union for having "helped by its passivity . . . the spread of infection", and accused France of "complicity . . . for not making public health a top priority".
A similar suit against French ministers and officials over the failure to stop using HIV-contaminated blood in transfusions in the 1980s ended with the trial of three ministers last year.
French alarm over mad cow disease was raised last month by news that meat from an infected herd was sold in shops and by a threefold increase in animals found with BSE this year compared to last.
The figure is now at 101 (181 since the disease appeared in 1991) but far short of the 170,000 British animals. Three people are known to have contracted vCJD in France, of whom two have died. In Britain, where the BSE epidemic broke out in 1986, the figure is more than 80.