KYOTO -- The family of a woman with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease will file a criminal complaint today with the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor's Office against two medical goods' suppliers.
The family says that dried brain tissues imported and sold by the two Tokyo-based firms based were not adequately sterilized and passed the lethal disease on to the patient, who is now in a vegetative state.
The planned criminal complaint will be the first involving CJD in Japan. Sanichi Tani, who runs a ranch in Kosei, Shiga Prefecture, and other family members claim that his wife contracted CJD when she received a transplant of the dried dura mater. The operation was carried out on the patient, who has a spinal cord disease, at a public hospital in 1989.
The family asserts that a former president of Nippon BBM and the president of Nippon BSS should face charges of attempted murder. A German pharmaceutical company selling dura mater started sterilizing the grafts in 1987, but the two firms that imported dura mater from the company neglected to recall unsterilized dura mater, according to Tani's lawyer, Akira Nakajima.
Tani's wife started showing symptoms of CJD such as fatigue, dementia and weak eyesight, in March 1996 and fell into a coma within three months. CJD, which has no known cure, causes patients to develop dementia, leading to death in one or two years.