Two people who worked at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (Inrae), in contact with prions, died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. One, Emilie Jaumain, a laboratory technician who died at the age of 33 in 2019, contracted this incurable neurodegenerative disease in 2010 after cutting herself while handling biological tissue infected with this type of pathogen, in a Jouy-en-Josas laboratory. The second, Pierrette C., died in November 2021, six years after retiring from a joint laboratory at Inrae and the Toulouse Veterinary School.
The announcement of the disease of the latter had led at the end of July 2021 to the suspension in France of research work on infectious prions and the launch of an inspection mission from the ministries of research and agriculture. This sheds light on the circumstances of potential accidental occupational contamination, and formulates a series of imperative recommendations so that work can resume with satisfactory safety for personnel. The inspection report was made public on Wednesday 26 January. It is accompanied by the publication of a good practice guide intended to provide a framework for work on prions, the drafting of which had been recommended in the fall of 2020 following an initial interministerial inspection.
The testimonies collected mention a “strong work pressure”, a “lack of information from the agents”, and evoke “a culture where the need to gain knowledge has taken precedence over other contingencies”.
Concerning Pierrette C., the new investigation mission made it possible to find in the accident records the trace of two cuts which occurred in 2004 and 2005, the second with a blade having been used the day before to cut tissue positive for encephalopathy bovine spongiform – “the practice, still current in the laboratory, is to change the blade only when it is blunt and not after each sample, nor at the end of the day”, notes the report. This does not exclude that other unlisted cuts during the handling between 2004 and 2015 of 67,500 samples by this technician could have caused the contamination, or that projections of tissue or the diffusion of aerosols carrying pray be responsible.
Inspectors note that cut-resistant gloves “were considered too restrictive” and were only set up in this research unit at the end of 2020. Similarly, protective glasses were not made compulsory until 2018, and the generalization of FFP2 masks dates from June 2021. The testimonies collected show a “high work pressure” of one “lack of information from agents”, and evoke “a culture where the need to gain knowledge has been able to take precedence over other contingencies”. The culture of reporting accidents at work “seemed little scope within the team”.
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