(Wine-Searcher) - Chemical companies taken to court in France over failure to notify potential users of the dangers of pesticide.

The family of a Bordeaux winegrower that died of a pesticide-related illness will file a case for manslaughter before the Public Health Division of the Paris courts.

James Bernard Murat died in December 2012 from cancer related to the use of a pesticide. He was exposed for 42 years, from 1958 to 2000, to sodium arsenite, a product used in treatments against Esca, a vine disease caused by parasitic fungi. The pesticide has been banned in France since November 2001.

The prosecution has accused the defendants – known only as X, by a quirk of French law – of manslaughter, as well as failing to warn of the potential dangers of the pesticide.

The case "targets the firms that produced the product that my father purchased, as well as the French state," said the winegrower's daughter, Valerie Murat.

"I do not want my father to have died for nothing. They deceived the rural community, they made fun of us; we made good little chemistry soldiers," she said.

The lawyer for the prosecution, Francois Lafforgue, noted that "the use of these pesticides, including pesticides based on arsenic, were banned in the early 1970s for agriculture and were banned for use in viticulture in 2001".

According to the anti-pesticide lobby groups Future Generations and Phyto-Victims, which support the Murat family's case, "the danger of sodium arsenite has been known since at least 1955, when the list of diseases related to arsenic use and its inorganic compounds was first drawn up."

The complaint "will aim to highlight all the responsible actors" and "alert farmers about the relationship between certain diseases and use of pesticides", said the prosecution in a statement.