Roanoke Times Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc. DATE: SUNDAY, May 15, 1994 TAG: 9405150051 SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO SOURCE: Associated Press DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The nation's three major blood collectors - the Red Cross, the American Association of Blood Banks and the Council of Community Blood Centers - said in a joint public statement on Jan. 13, 1983:
"The presently available medical and scientific evidence that AIDS can be spread by blood components remains incomplete. . . . We do not advise routine implementation of any laboratory screening program for AIDS by blood banks at this time."
They refused to adopt the test for hepatitis B, which national Centers for Disease Control officials said could have been in place by March 1983. The current AIDS or HIV test hadn't been developed yet.
The blood-bank groups maintained the test was too expensive and that there was no hard evidence that people could get AIDS from transfusions, despite CDC officials' assertions that the disease posed a serious threat to the blood supply.
Privately, however, officials at the Red Cross believed AIDS could be transmitted through blood, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press.
Paul Cumming, the Red Cross planning and marketing manager, wrote in an internal memo: "The available evidence strongly suggests that AIDS is transmissible" through blood.
"As time goes on we are liable to get more and more pressure to utilize" blood tests and donor screening. "CDC increasingly needs a major epidemic to justify its existence," Cumming wrote a colleague on Feb. 5, 1983.
"To the extent the [blood] industry . . . sticks together against CDC, it will appear to some segments of the public at least, that we have a self-interest which is in conflict with the public interest, unless we can clearly demonstrate that CDC is wrong," Cumming wrote.
"In the short run, our position has all the earmarks of a lose-lose one. The question would seem to be, how do we minimize the short-run loss and hopefully gain in the long run?"
In one document, Cumming did a cost-benefit analysis and assigned a $500,000 value to each transfusion recipient who would be protected from AIDS by the blood test.
The memos are among thousands of pages of documents that, at the Red Cross's request, were placed under protective orders by judges in various transfusion cases. The orders prohibit public disclosure of the documents but the AP obtained them privately from sources familiar with the issue.
The CDC estimates that 6,567 Americans have developed AIDS from transfusions since 1981. Only 29 of those cases were caused by transfusions received after March 1985, when blood banks nationwide voluntarily began using a new HIV test. HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, was discovered as the cause of AIDS in 1984.
The CDC says it doesn't know how many of the 6,567 have died of AIDS or how many other people are HIV-positive as a result of transfusions but haven't yet developed AIDS.
Cumming, in a recent telephone interview, rejected any second-guessing of his actions.
"Given the same information, the same environment at that time, I don't see that we made any mistakes. There was no scientific evidence," said Cumming, a statistician who does consulting work for the Red Cross and federal agencies. "We made the best decisions it was possible to make."
Nearly all of the AIDS patients - homosexual men, hemophiliacs and intravenous drug users - also had suffered from hepatitis B at some time and produced antibodies to fight it that stayed in their blood.
Cumming said the hepatitis B blood test "was not a good test, by any criteria I know for a test" because it would have produced 1 million false positive results.
by CNB