Justice opened an investigation on Friday to follow up on the alarming state of health of former employees of the company Tetra Médical. 160 people worked there in Ardèche, until liquidation in February 2022.
This preliminary investigation for “endangering the lives of others” was entrusted “to the gendarmerie region (…) and to the direction of work”, announced the prosecutor of Privas, Cécile Deprade, to AFP. This week, the industrial tribunal of Annonay, where the company was headquartered, also recorded 51 files from former employees for “prejudice of anxiety”, said lawyer specializing in occupational diseases François Lafforgue.
Thirty other files are in preparation. Objective: “To compensate employees at risk of serious illness” for exposure to ethylene oxide. This carcinogenic, mutagenic and reprotoxic gas has been used for several decades to sterilize medical and surgical equipment produced at Tetra (compresses, single-use kits, etc.).
Cancers and malformations in “Tetra babies”
“The company’s security guards reassured us, explaining that it was a heavy gas, remaining on the ground. In our head, we said to ourselves that we were not afraid of anything”, confides Catherine Guironnet, former production agent, victim of two cancers in 2003 and 2019. “The more this file progresses, the more we realize the extent of the damage . Not much has been done correctly in this undertaking,” says François Lafforgue.
Serious pathologies are also noted in children born to mothers employed in the company. One of them, Aurélie Piot, collected 13 testimonies describing “cancers, congenital malformations” of “Tetra babies”, but also deficiency of “fertility of mothers”.