One of the sadder stories coming out of Arkansas when Bill Clinton was governor didn’t get much press in the US: The story of a lucrative blood collection program in Arkansas jails that resulted in tainted blood and plasma that killed people.
After all, Monica was so much more interesting than trying to prove the links between good old boys covering up for one another that led to so many people dying overseas and in Canada.
A Salon article (the source of much of this story) explains it this way:
To date, the scandal has gotten almost no media attention in the United States. While reporters are riveted by the Monica Lewinsky mess, they’ve ignored a real Clinton scandal, maybe because it involves two groups no one cares much about — people who aren’t Americans, and prisoners.
Today’s news says that the Canadian courts have dismissed charges against doctors in charge of the Red Cross and a pharmacutical company involved in the case.
The plaintiffs in the case are furious:
John Plater of the Canadian Hemophilia Society could barely contain his bewilderment at the verdict….”If you, on the one hand, have a study that says there’s a problem, and on the other hand have a study that says maybe there isn’t a problem, any reasonable person takes the product off the market. They didn’t. People were infected, and people died. How that could be considered reasonable behaviour is beyond us.”
James Kreppner, a lawyer who contacted both HIV and hepatitis C from tainted blood, shared Plater’s incredulity.
The Canadian blood scandal was indeed huge:
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Canada’s blood system infected approximately 1200 people with the HIV virus and another 12 000 people with hepatitis C. Many of the victims were hemophiliacs and people who had received blood during routine operations. At that time, we had less knowledge than we do now about these viruses and many of those who had been infected did not know they had received contaminated blood. Some people unknowingly passed on the viruses to their spouses and family members. As a result, by the 1990s it was estimated that the number of infected people had increased substantially and exponentially. The staggering number of victims, almost 3000 deaths to date, illustrated that the blood system had failed the very people it was supposed to protect. In response, many people began calling for a judicial inquiry into Canada’s blood system.
As far back as the 1960’s when I was in medical school we were aware that Hepatitis B was higher in blood from high risk populations, and the city shut down the local blood banks that bought blood on skid row from drunks and other down and outers.
But once HIV epidemic started in the early 1980’s, and it was recognized that such blood might be contaminated, there were warnings and prohibitions against buying blood from prisons or paid donors, and all donors had to be carefully screened for medical problems (history of hepatitis) or behavior that are statistically associated with hepatitis B. (Medical note: Hepatitis B and HIV are both spread via blood and body fluids, so in the days before HIV screening was available, the Hepatitis B test was a marker for high risk of HIV).
Henderson would later tell police investigators, “Historically, this [was] the worse possible time to [sell plasma]. I called all over the world and finally got one group in Canada who would take the contract.” That group was Continental Pharma Cryosan Ltd., the biggest blood broker in Canada.
The CBC has the time line HERE.
The Kever report in detail is HERE.
The book Blood Trail also relates the sad story.
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