森永ミルク中毒事件におけるいわゆる未確認被害者問題について

抄録

Finally, 19 years after the incidence of poisoning by arsenic tainted Morinaga Dry Milk, the permanent relief work has been just started for the sufferers.
How to treat nonregistered sufferers, i. e. sufferers who were not registered by the Ministry of Health and Welfare in the Morinaga Dry Milk poisoning incident, is a very important problem.
In order to clarify the cause and actual state of nonregistered sufferers, a study was carried out using the data of Kyoto follow-up survey (Jap. J. Hyg. Vol. 27, No. 4, 364-399, 1972) and many medical reports about Morinaga Dry Milk poisoning.
Results are summarized as follow:
1) The nonregistered sufferers' group consisted of relatively younger patients who had slighter symptoms than the registered sufferers' group in the those days.
2) On the data of the Kyoto follow-up survey by the Kyoto Prefecture, nonregistered sufferers' group had as many physical and mental complaints as the registered group, and the state of the nonregistered group was similar to that of the registered group.
3) The criteria for diagnosis of the poisoning by the Nisizawa committee and the treatment by the Ministry of Health and Welfare and municipal governments for sufferers in those days were inadequate.
4) The occurrence in nonregistered was foundamentally caused by the fact that the sufferers were registered on the basis of the criteria for the diagnosis of the poisoning, but not on the basis of drinking the arsenic tainted Moririnaga Dry Milk.
5) That is the question, why doctors in those days did not take a serious view of the fact that no man had heretofore ever experienced such mass arsenic poisoning in infants and that many of the sufferers were infants who were physically and mentally in the developing process, and they came to a conclusion according to the medical well-known knowledge of arsenic poisoning in those days.
6) One should pay attention to the fact that the damage of sufferers consisted not only of physical damage but also of psychological or socieoecnomical damages.
If the official registeration of sufferers is made only according to the criteria for the clinical diagnosis of the poisoning, nonregistered sufferers can be produced inevitably in any public nuisance.
7) The officical registration of sufferers must be based on the fact that they had been drinking the arsenic tainted Morinaga Dry Milk in those days.
Many of the nonregistered sufferers can not show any evidence of drinking aresenic tainted Morinaga Dry Milk because government and medical officers have disrecorded such evidence in the past. So, nonregistered sufferers should be registered on the basis of their families' verbal evidences.