Parents bitter over postponement of Remedia trial

Court gives attorneys more time to view material in case of babies killed and harmed by tainted formula.

By DAN IZENBERG
remedia 224.88 (photo credit: Channel 2)
remedia 224.88
(photo credit: Channel 2)
Parents of the babies who died or suffered severe damage as a result of tainted Remedia formula stood angrily outside the crowded Petah Tikvah Magistrate's courtroom of Judge Lia Lev-On on Wednesday and later heard that she had postponed the trial of eight suspects in the case by another five months, until March 4, 2009. "Today, they postponed the trial until March," said Aviva Chayivi, of Afula, whose five-year-old daughter, Noa, has been paralyzed since infancy as a result of drinking the milk substitute which lacked vitamin B-1. "When we come in March, they'll put it off until September. In the end, I think this trial will never take place." The Remedia scandal erupted in 2003. Two babies died and more than 20 others suffered severe damage after being fed Remedia. It took five years for the state to file an indictment against eight people involved in the affair, including three senior company officials and five Health Ministry employees. Yesterday, many of the parents of these babies came to see the opening day of the trial, during which Lev-On was due to read out the indictment and the defendants were to submit their pleas. However, there was no room in the courtroom for them. While they stood outside bitterly, lawyers for some of the defendants told the judge they had not had enough time to prepare their defense and that the prosecution had failed to supply all the evidence and given what they had given to them in a disorderly way. They asked to postpone the trial for a year. Lev-On granted them less than five months. "The lawyers claim they don't have all the investigative material," said Chayivi. "I invite them to my place. I have all the material and if I have it, they should have it too. They couldn't care less about our children. They have been contemptuous for the past five years and they continue to be contemptuous. We dropped everything and came to the hearing. I didn't know I would be coming to the first hearing to be told the trial was postponed until March. The court has to take responsibility and hold the hearings continuously and bring an end to this affair as quickly as possible." "When people see us, they see our children," said Hillel Breuer, whose daughter, Hili, was damaged by the formula. "But the judge didn't even make the effort to see us." Lior Salpeter of Ra'anana said with tears in his eyes that his life had ground to a halt in 2003, when his baby was hurt. "For five years we have been taking care of our children and running between hospitals and the defendants are sitting here and no one will touch them. They don't care about us. They don't care that our lives have been ruined. The only thing they care about is that their business was destroyed. I would simply like that they be taken every day to the hospital rehabilitation ward so that they could look into the eyes of the children who are in the condition of our children." The suspects include Gideon Landsberger, who was the general manager of Remedia, company owner Moshe Miller, and Frederick Black, who was in charge of quality control and research and development. The Health Ministry defendants include Dr. Dorit Nitzan-Kaluski, head of the National Food Service at the time, and four inspectors, Nasreen Khouri, Yosef Haskel, Berta Shvum and Raisa Parvarov. According to the indictment, the harm to the babies was caused by the fact that the German-based Milchwerke Westfalen EG (Humana GmbH) company, which supplied the formula to Remedia in Israel, did not include vitamin B-1 (Thiamin supplement) in a new formula it began manufacturing in 2003. Although senior officials in Remedia allegedly knew that Humana had decided to stop adding the vitamin, it did nothing about it. Furthermore, Remedia reportedly retained the old list of ingredients appearing on the label of each tin of new formula. The list stated that the new formula included 385 micrograms of vitamin B-1 for each 100 grams of formula, even though this was untrue.