Ex-health official held guilty for neglect over death from HIV-tainted blood
products

The Tokyo District Court on September 28 sentenced Matsumura Akihito, a
former Health and Welfare Ministry official, to one year in prison for
professional negligence causing death from HIV-tainted medicine.

Matsumura is the first bureaucrat to be convicted of failure to fulfill
his duty to protect the life and health of the people.

The judge said that Matsumura, who was the chief of a division dealing
with drug administration, neglected to perform his duties regarding drug
safety when he allowed unsafe unheated blood products to be used even after
the government approved the safe heated product in December 1985.

The plaintiffs and their lawyers appreciated the judgment as "epochal" as
the judiciary's first recognition of the negligence of administrative
authorities as illegal and punishable. At the same time, they raised
questions about the ruling having a very narrow view of the administration's
supervisory responsibility.

Akahata's editorial of September 29 said that the ruling is reasonable
and pointed out the political problem of cozy ties being maintained between
bureaucrats and corporations, the underlying cause of medication-related
diseases.

Akahata took note of Matsumura's statement that he dared not order a ban
on the sale of unheated blood products and their recall from the market lest
pharmaceutical companies suffer losses. The editorial went on to say that
the collusion between bureaucrats and the corporations placed business
interests before human lives and thereby caused the medication-related
damage. It said that the government is responsible to sever this collusion.

Last year, 110 pharmaceutical companies offered over 100 million yen in
political donations to Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro and other Liberal
Democratic Party Dietmembers.

Akahata stressed the need to shed light on the collusive structure and to
continue questioning the personal responsibility of bureaucrats in order to
end medication-caused damage in Japan. (end)