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Haemophilia patients launch action against Bayer over contaminated blood products

Nebraska Deborah Josefson

A class action lawsuit has been launched against the Bayer and Baxter corporations on behalf of people with haemophilia in Asia and Latin America who contracted HIV or hepatitis through contaminated blood products supplied by the companies.

Also named in the lawsuit were the Armour Pharmaceutical Company and Alpha Therapeutic Corporation. The suit was filed in a US federal court in California.

All four companies are accused of distributing contaminated blood products in Asia and Latin America in 1984-5, even after such products were taken off the US market because of fears that they had not been properly screened for HIV and hepatitis C virus.

While a true screening test for the viruses did not exist at the time, careful screening of donors could have minimised the risk, the suit contends. The lawsuit further alleges that the companies bought blood and plasma from the high risk groups of people, including prisoners, injecting drug users, and promiscuous gay men.

The class action contends that thousands of people with haemophilia contracted HIV or hepatitis C from tainted blood products. By 1992 the contaminated products had infected at least 5000 haemophiliac people in Europe with HIV, and more than 2000 people had developed AIDS. A total of 1250 people had died from the disease, the lawsuit added.

The lawsuit also found that by the mid-1990s most of the 4000 people in Japan with AIDS were haemophiliac people and that nearly all of the cases were linked to contaminated clotting factors traced to the United States.

In Latin America at least 700 cases of HIV are linked to use of contaminated blood products by haemophiliac people, the lawsuit said. In the mid-1990s the four companies paid out $640m (£390m; €545m) in damages to settle a similar lawsuit.

In a statement Bayer said: "Bayer complied with all regulations in force in the relevant countries based on the amount of scientific evidence available at that time."

The decisions that the company made 20 years ago should not be judged by the same standards of scientific knowledge available now, the statement said.
 


 

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Collections under which this article appears: Other Ethics Medicine and the law (incl forensic medicine) Haematology Incl Blood Transfusion

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