Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

by Rose George

Although the new variety of hepatitis was poorly understood and there was no test for it, by the early 1980s it was known that both hepatitis and HIV could be dealt with by good screening of donors, and with heat. But this was costly: the clotting factors weren’t destroyed but they were reduced so that more plasma was needed. Also, companies had lots of inventory of untreated factor on the shelves. They decided that it had to go somewhere. At a 1984 conference at the Centers for Disease Control in Washington, DC, a minority argued strongly that all non-heat-treated product should be discarded. The majority disagreed: it should be a matter for local medical personnel.28 A report by Justice Horace Krever into the contamination by US products of the Canadian blood supply titled one section “The Sorry Story of Blood Product Withdrawals.”29 It was sorry because it didn’t happen. An editorial in the Lancet, while recognizing the benefits of heat treatment, concluded an editorial with the reminder that “by far the commonest cause of haemophiliac death is bleeding.”30 By the mid-1980s, heat treatment was adopted as standard, but some companies continued to export their old, unheated inventory. Cutter sold it to Taiwan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Argentina, Japan, and Indonesia, exporting more than one hundred thousand vials of unsafe, unheated concentrate—even though by then it produced heated product, too—and earned more than $4 million. In response, Bayer officials told the New York T...