The widow of the scientist who studied Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in a Bellvitge laboratory, and who died in 2022 at the age of 45 after manifesting symptoms compatible with the disease he was investigating, filed a lawsuit for civil protection of the right to honor against the director from the laboratory, the neuropathologist Isidre Ferrer.
Fellow scientist Ana Villar, who worked on her husband's team, Franc Llorens, decided to hire a lawyer and go to court after professor Isidre Ferrer discovered thousands of unauthorized samples in a freezer at laboratory 4141, when the scientist began to feel unwell and requested leave.
The widow, who married Llorens after being diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease at the Hospital Clínic in Barcelona, considered that Ferrer attacked her husband's honor. The director of the laboratory had held Llorens responsible for having endangered the safety of the rest of the personnel who worked in that space of the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (Idibell), located on the premises of the University of Barcelona (UB).
At the beginning of 2021, Ana Villar sent letters threatening legal action to Isidre Ferrer, to another person who worked in the laboratory, to the Idibell management. A year and a half later, in the summer of 2022, she only filed a complaint against Isidre Ferrer. She accuses him of having disrespected Franc Llorens for having disclosed that she suffered from a disease caused by prions. A trial date has not yet been set.
Ferrer reported the situation to the Idibell management and the UB when he discovered potentially contagious unregistered biological samples in a freezer in the laboratory where Llorens worked. However, neither Idibell nor the UB requested that an autopsy be performed on the deceased neuroscientist, which would have definitively confirmed Creutzfeldt-Jakob's diagnosis. The body was cremated at the express wish of his widow.
Aside from this lawsuit filed by the widow against Ferrer, the Mossos d'Esquadra are already investigating to try to take a first photograph of what could have happened in that laboratory. A snapshot of the events known so far that allows them to determine whether or not there was any crime in the actions of Franc Llorens, his team, the laboratory or those responsible for it. A crime against occupational health and safety that, in this case, would have had Llorens himself as the main victim.
The police officers of the central consumer unit of the Criminal Investigation Division are in charge of carrying out these first investigations so that in the coming days they will agree with their superiors whether they will deliver a first report to the Prosecutor's Office, whether the case will be prosecuted in court or whether it will continue. working by trade.
It will not be easy to determine if the scientist was infected by manipulating prions in a laboratory without the biomedical safety required to work with these potentially infectious proteins. It will not be easy due to the nature of the disease, but also because at the time an autopsy was not performed on the scientist. The autopsy could have been performed in the so-called Ebola room of the Institute of Legal Medicine of Catalonia, enabled precisely for these clinical autopsies.
