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

by Rose George

In the UK, hemophiliacs were used as guinea pigs. Or chimps, actually. In a 1982 letter, Professor Arthur Bloom, a hematologist at the Oxford hemophilia center where Neil Weller was treated, proposed testing the new heat-treated product on hemophiliacs. It had been tested previously on chimpanzees, but animal testing was expensive. Bloom decided that quality controls would be better—and less costly—if they were carried out on hemophiliacs who had not yet been exposed to large pooled products.35 The candidates were called PUPs, for previously untreated patients. Most were children. No PUPs were told that they were a human experiment. One was Colin Smith, treated by Bloom. He died of AIDS at the age of seven. In the months before Colin’s death, his parents had to pick him up in two sheepskins because he couldn’t tolerate the pain of being touched.36 Later it was discovered that a product called Factorate, produced by Armour, was heat-treated with a process inferior to the other companies. Armour was told in 1985 of cases of HIV infection in people using Factorate. It did not modify its process until two years later.37 Tainted blood activists today say that they are “cheaper than chimps.” But bleeders are also used to being told how expensive they are, because of how costly factor is. In 1985, a junior minister named Kenneth Clarke wrote that he was skeptical of heat-treating UK-produced factor. After all, “only hemophiliacs have died.” It’s an extraordinary memo. “Of course,...