Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 24, 1994 TAG: 9410250047
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Philadelphia Inquirer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
For years, they say, the National Hemophilia Foundation told them that contracting AIDS from blood-clotting medicines was an unavoidable tragedy, caused by lack of early knowledge about the disease.
Now, a deposition and other documents related to a lawsuit against the foundation and four drug companies show that foundation executives understood as early as 1982 that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, likely was a blood-borne virus, that it could be transmitted to others by blood, and that there was the potential for an epidemic.
Documents obtained by the Inquirer from the lawsuit and from government files show that:
In December 1982, Louis Aledort, the foundation's medical co-director, counseled a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel against requiring drug companies to kill viruses in clotting products, which are made from human blood. He said it might drive prices higher than people with hemophilia could afford.
In July 1983, when an industry official estimated that up to 30 percent of blood-clotting products going on the market might be contaminated with HIV, Aledort told the FDA advisory panel that the foundation board wanted the government to order recalls, but that his personal view was that ``this is not the time for recall.'' The panel did not recommend a recall.
In October 1985, the foundation board passed a resolution that said ``it would not be in the best interests of persons with hemophilia'' for a class-action suit to be filed against the drug manufacturers. The lawyer for one company attended the meeting, where he presented the board with his own suggested version of the resolution.
In 1986, when the foundation was asked its position on lawsuits against the drug manufacturers, its then-president wrote that he considered the companies to be foundation ``constituents'' and ``family members.''
When people with hemophilia began to die from AIDS in the late 1980s, two former foundation medical directors and some doctors who served on the organization's medical advisory committee testified against patients who sued the drug companies. It wasn't until after ``soul-searching and some serious reflection'' that this practice was stopped, according to a deposition from Alan P. Brownstein, who was the foundation's executive director from 1981 until this year.
In the deposition, Brownstein said that three months after the July 1983 FDA meeting, Aledort was forced out as the foundation's medical director.
Representatives of the drug makers said last week they had acted properly. The drug companies say they responded to the crisis as quickly as possible, given that so little was known in the early years of the epidemic about AIDS and how it was transmitted.
As the foundation prepares for its annual meeting Wednesday through Sunday in Dallas, its conduct in the AIDS epidemic never has been more controversial.
HIV-contaminated clotting drugs have infected more than half of those in the United States who suffer from hemophilia. About 3,000 have died. About 7,000 to 9,000 more have tested positive for HIV. Many of them are children.
It is one of the worst public-health disasters in U.S. history.
The class-action suit and documents related to it challenge the foundation's advocacy for the nearly 20,000 Americans with hemophilia.
by CNB