Abstract

Catastrophically bad decisions were an all-too-frequent occurrence when it came to managing blood for therapeutic purposes in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. The victims of those bad decisions were, first and foremost, the persons who received HIV-contaminated blood via their medical treatments. During the 1980s, at least 20,000 patients in the United States contracted HIV infections via "tainted" blood treatments. More than half of the nation's 16,000 hemophilia patients were among that number. Unlike the roughly 12,000 Americans who contracted HIV through a standard whole blood transfusion during that decade, nearly all of these hemophilia patients contracted HIV from a commercially manufactured clotting...