Nightline: Hemophiliacs Assail Drug Firms Tainted Blood

W A S H I N G T O N,  Dec. 27 -- Think of them as “canaries in the coal mine.” Like the fragile birds sent down into the mines to detect the first whiffs of toxic gas, hemophiliacs represent a first line of defense against any infectious threat to the nation’s blood supply.

If groups of hemophiliacs suddenly become sick, their misfortune may very well alert the rest of us to the dangers of bad blood.

For hemophiliacs, regular infusions of a blood-clotting agent made from donated plasma have become essential to life. This agent, known as Factor VIII, reduces their blood-clotting time from hours to just minutes. It has been received by hemophiliacs and their families as a miracle drug that permits children to play without fear of uncontrolled bleeding from a simple scrape and allows adults to live twice as long as they might have a generation ago.

But Factor VIII, which was synthesized from the plasma of 20,000 to 100,000 donors, also carried a significant downside: If one of these donors is infected with a blood-born virus, the miraculous factor would also be contaminated. Many hemophiliacs were exposed to the hepatitis virus in the 1970s and to AIDS in the early 1980s — experiences that suggest how a miracle can become a nightmare.

Tainted TransfusionsThousands of hemophiliacs died from AIDS when they became infected via HIV-infected Factor VIII. Official numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that 3,511 hemophiliacs died; but of the approximately 20,000 hemophiliacs living in the United States in 1980, as many as 8,500 were infected by the disease through tainted transfusions.

These CDC figures are contested by many in the hemophiliac community, who claim that as many as 10,000 hemophiliacs died as a result of HIV-infected Factor VIII. And many families of hemophiliacs blame the manufacturers of Factor VIII, which they believe could have done more to spare hemophiliacs exposure to this deadly disease.

At the beginning of the epidemic, representatives of the drug companies point out, they were forced to make decisions based on a lack of scientific knowledge of what caused AIDS and are thus not to blame for the hemophiliacs’ deaths. They also allege that the Food and Drug Administration had failed to properly regulate blood products early enough in the AIDS crisis.