By the mid-1970s, though, hemophiliacs were being treated with injections of concentrated factor VIII. Distilled out of thousands of liters of human blood, a single dose of the clotting factor was equivalent to a hundred blood transfusions. A typical patient with hemophilia was thus exposed to the condensed essence of blood from thousands of donors. The emergence of the mysterious immunological collapse among patients with multiple blood transfusions pinpointed the cause of the illness to a blood-borne factor that had contaminated the supply of factor VIII—possibly a novel virus. The syndrome
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I had no idea
