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The French attorney general has called for all charges to be dropped against three former ministers accused of “collusion in poisoning” (see Nature 364, 269; 1993).

Former prime minister Laurent Fabius has been accused, with former deputy health minister Edmond Hervé and former social affairs minister Georgina Dufoix, of delaying the introduction of systematic screening of donated blood for HIV in 1985. He was said to have done this to protect the national market for a French AIDS test, marketed by Diagnostics Pasteur, when a US test from Abbott Laboratories was already available (see Nature 367, 673; 1994 & 371, 369; 1994).

But attorney general Jean-François Burgelin concludes that screening, introduced on 19 June 1985, began within a reasonable time, and ahead of many other countries, such as the United Kingdom, which started screening in autumn 1985. He praises Fabius for acting “decisively” in the absence of a clear consensus from the medical and scientific communities. The report criticizes their “passivity” in the face of the emergence of AIDS, and their failure to alert the government.

Hervé is criticized in the brief for “blindness” and for having failed to take sufficient initiative. But Burgelin concludes that this did not constitute a crime.

The brief also challenges the claim that Abbott was in a position to supply the French market following approval of its test by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in March 1985. French investigators who visited Abbott's Chicago headquarters last year say the company could not provide evidence that this was the case, having destroyed archives relating to the period in line with its policy on expiration of archives.

Other documents raise doubts about the reliability of the Abbott test. A 1986 memo from the American Red Cross shows that the FDA had been warned that the Abbott test gave false negatives.

Meanwhile, the investigation of some 40 scientists and administrators already charged (see Nature 375, 526; 1995) is drawing to a close, with a decision on their trials expected soon. The investigating judge, Marie-Odile Bertella-Geffroy, had asked for for the criminal investigations to be extended into a wider-ranging inquiry, but this was turned down last week by the public prosecutor's office.