This has been mentioned in news programmes: people being infected with HIV and hepatitis during the 1970s from transfusions of blood carrying the viruses or bacteria.
The reports were strangely uninformative though, and appeared to lay some blame on medical staff. The origin of the dodgy blood was never mentioned, and it was claimed - wrongly I suspect - that it is difficult or expensive to check the health or otherwise of bags of gore.
I seem to remember that it came from the US, where it was, and perhaps still is, common for people to sell their own blood to raise a few bucks. Needless to say many such people were not only poor but diseased. Medical staff here can hardly be blamed for what seems to be attributable to international capitalism. Or can they? Anyway it's more of a scandal than the media so far are letting on, seems to me.
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I was hoping Lygonos might have a view, but I wouldn't want to importune him.
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I can't pretend to know that much about the screening programme and whether there was an avoidable delay between screening becoming available and being introduced.
My understanding is that the blood products used (clotting factors for haemophilia) were made in batches from large numbers of donations, meaning that every injection/infusion administered meant patients were exposed to potential infection from dozens of donors.
It all seems a bit horse-has-bolted but for the individuals concerned, to have gone from having a treatable life-threatening condition to having HIV +/- Hep C, watching other patients becoming ill and dying from these viruses, and basically having your hopes of family life (and life itself) thrown up in the air - must have been utterly horrendous.
From my limited knowledge, I'm not sure how it could really have been done differently at the time, however.
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Thank you Lygonos. It seems there's always a slight risk with blood or plasma transfusions then.
What with the mad pilot and this, the world seems to have become a little bit more threatening this week. We must try to be brave and not think too much.
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Tainted blood scandal - Armel Coussine
