AIDS patients due to transfusion of HIV infected, non-heat-treated blood products

Abstract

Many hemophiliacs have suffered from AIDS because particular lots of non-heat-treated blood products, used in the first half of the 1980s to treat hemophilia, were tainted with HIV. We needed to replace the non-heat-treated products with heat-treated products as soon as possible. Norway and Finland succeeded in this replacement, and sustained relatively little losses. Failure in this replacement in France, Canada and Japan led to a relatively great deal of harm. Japan delayed the implementation of relevant policy mainly because of the judgment of the AIDS research division of the Ministry of Health and Welfare that Japan should continue to use non-heat-treated blood products. One president and two ex-presidents (at that time) of a pharmaceutical company, which did not recall the risky non-heat-treated blood products, were sentenced to imprisonment without work. One bureaucrat was handed a suspended sentence of imprisonment without work. One doctor, who was a leading scholar in hemophilia and served as section chief of the AIDS research division, was judged not guilty because treatment using non-heat-treated blood products was a medical care standard of the time (MCST). There is an imbalance of responsibility since medical policies practically reflect the intention of the medical community. The theory of MCST lets a medical community remain behind advanced policy because it is immune from juridical responsibility. A juridical system based on the theory of MCST does not lead to rapid progress in medical policy for risk avoidance. We need to construct alternative theories to the theory of MCST, or other mechanisms than the juridical system.