Fifty years ago, France discovered with horror that an ordinary baby hygiene product might kill as surely as a poison: this was the beginning of the Morhange talc affair. Account of a poisoning which caused the death of 36 children, made 204 victims in total and laid bare the weakness of health controls, from the archives of AFP.
On August 24, 1972, the Ministry of Health published a curious “warning once morest the use of talc”, the powder that is sprinkled on the buttocks of babies. The ministry reports “accidents recently occurring to young children” which “might be due to the use of talc Morhange”. In Charleville-Mézières, the head of the pediatrics department at Manchester Hospital, Doctor Jean-François Elchardus, has been intrigued for several weeks by a strange epidemic of encephalitis in infants. The clinical picture is the same each time: “very irritated buttocks, drowsy and comatose state, interspersed with nervous paroxysms”. The evolution is often “lightning”: death occurs “within 24 to 48 hours”, explains the pediatrician to AFP.
Among the young victims, Hervé Bouanich, 14 months, was a boy “strong” for his age, remembers his mother. “I took Morhange talc in any store. It said on the box that it was baby talc. For four days I applied this product”, she explains to AFP special envoy André Chavanne. The death of Hervé Bouanich and the discovery of talc at his parents’ home serve as a detonator. Dispatched from Paris, epidemiologist Gilbert Martin-Bouyer of Inserm, had the powder seized from the Bouanichs analyzed. The analysis reveals an “exaggerated content of hexachlorophene”, a powerful bactericide. In the process, a test is carried out on a dog: the animal dies in two hours.
How might an antiseptic as powerful as hexachlorophene end up at more than 6% in a harmless baby powder? The director of the Morhange perfumery, Paul Berty, is formal: his talc has no reason to contain it. “The contract we signed with Sético does not mention this substance at all”. La Sético is a sub-contracting company in the Paris region which “packages” cosmetics for major brands such as Morhange. It also defends itself, ensuring that it is “neither a laboratory nor a manufacturing company” even if it produces “the final mixture of various products”.
“Judicial failure”
Among these various products is hexachlorophene, a bactericide developed in 1939 by the Swiss firm Givaudan. Nowadays, the chemical safety data sheet for this “organochlorine compound” clearly warns: “harmful in contact with skin”, “presumed risk of serious damage to the nervous system”. But at the time, hexachlorophene was incorporated into hundreds of cosmetic products to improve their preservation and increase their antiseptic properties: soaps, shaving creams, deodorants and even toothpastes contained it, according to the specialized blog “Cosmetics and skin”.
Givaudan delivers to Sético, like to others, this white powder in fifty-kilo drums, under the trade name “G-11”, without any particular warning. The law does not require it. It was not until the end of August 1972 that the Minister of Health Jean Foyer decided, as a matter of urgency, to classify the product in “table C of poisonous substances” which includes dangerous products used as drugs.
The trial organized seven years later at the criminal court of Pontoise shows that disorder and dirt reigned in the premises of Sético…
