Patel, for her part, was never exercised by the more sordid details of the case. Her approach to matters of justice is one of premature adjudication: the guilty are everywhere, and only multiply. When it came to WikiLeaks, such fine points of law and fact as a shaky indictment based on fabricated evidence, meditations on assassination, and a genuine, diagnosed risk of self-harm, were piffling distractions. The US Department of Justice would not be denied.
It is 1986. A blood test to screen for non A, non B Hepatitis, costing just 5 cents per test, has been shown to significantly reduce the amount of contaminated blood being collected and given to people needing transfusions. It is not a specific test, so it also rules out a small percentage of healthy donors due to occasional false positive results. Blood banks throughout the US are using the test for medical, ethical and legal reasons. What was Australia to do? Queensland’s Blood Service started using the test but no other Australian blood service did so. Many thousands of people were infected as a result. Elizabeth Minter reports in this third of her series on Australia’s infected blood scandal.
The Red Cross actively encouraged people it knew were infected with Hepatitis C to continue to donate blood in defiance of basic principles of blood safety. As set out by World Health Organisation guidelines, a safe blood donor is healthy and has no risk factors for HIV or other infections. Knowingly including infected blood into a therapeutic setting is a basic breach. Elizabeth Minter reports Part II of the infected blood scandal investigation.
olddogthoughts 