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Gift of Life or Kiss of Death?Awake!—1990 | October 22
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Gift of Life or Kiss of Death?
“How many people have to die? How many deaths do you need? Give us the threshold of death that you need in order to believe that this is happening.”
DON FRANCIS, an official of the CDC (U.S. Centers for Disease Control), pounded his fist on the table as he shouted the above words at a meeting with top representatives of the blood-banking industry. The CDC was trying to convince the blood bankers that AIDS was spreading through the nation’s blood supply.
The blood bankers were unconvinced. They called the evidence tenuous—just a handful of cases—and decided not to step up blood testing or screening. That was on January 4, 1983. Six months later, the president of the American Association of Blood Banks asserted: “There is little or no danger to the general public.”
For many experts, there was already enough evidence to warrant some action. And since then, that original “handful of cases” has ballooned alarmingly. Before 1985, perhaps 24,000 people were given transfusions tainted with HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), which causes AIDS.
Contaminated blood is an appallingly efficient way to spread the AIDS virus. According to The New England Journal of Medicine (December 14, 1989), a single unit of blood may carry enough virus to cause up to 1.75 million infections! The CDC told Awake! that by June 1990, in the United States alone, 3,506 people had already developed AIDS from blood transfusions, blood components, and tissue transplants.
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Gift of Life or Kiss of Death?Awake!—1990 | October 22
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Hemophiliacs, most of whom use a plasma-based clotting agent to treat their illness, were decimated. In the United States, between 60 and 90 percent of them got AIDS before a procedure was set up to heat-treat the medicine in order to rid it of HIV.
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