From the Radio Free Michigan archives ftp://141.209.3.26/pub/patriot If you have any other files you'd like to contribute, e-mail them to bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu. ------------------------------------------------ The following sections are excerpts from "The Blood Conspiracy" by Joleen Swain Ottosen. The book is an expose of the blood industry and health bureaucracy. AIDS and hepatitis tests still allow some infected blood donations to slip through undetected. And during the past four years, blood banks have reported causing over 30,000 accidents and errors. In 1993, the FDA sued the American Red Cross for a five-year failure to correct blood safety violations on a national level. The Blood Conspiracy is also a well-documented story of a family that received not one, but two AIDS-tainted transfusions. Millions of hepatitis infections and tens of thousands of AIDS infections have been given to Americans by a blood supply they were assured was safe. The Swain family's high-risk behavior for contracting AIDS was believing safe-blood propaganda. At the end of the excerpts, health consumers are warned that today's transfusion climate is one of "patient beware". A free report on the numerous ways patients can be transfused with their own safe blood is available on request. ----- I sat at my father's funeral listening to a quartet sing, "Not now but in the coming years . . . Sometime, sometime we'll understand. "I knew it would take years of investigation to uncover the truth surrounding the events of his death. It would be a long time before our family "understood". My thoughts riveted on that fateful day three and a half years before January 4, 1985the day Dad received 18 units of blood during coronary bypass surgery in Salt Lake City, Utah. Now at age 79 he was gonenot a victim of heart disease but of transfusion AIDS. Orville Swain died on the 4th of July, 1988. It seemed appropriate that as the nation he loved celebrated its independence, he had finally gained his freedom from those horrible years of suffering. I tried not to think of my father's wasted body and to remember happier times. They seemed so long ago, crowded out by the dreadful happenings of the past several years. I fought back tears as I remembered my mother's AIDS infection and subsequent death just 11 months beforea death that mercifully had not been so long in coming, but one that was caused by the blood bank's callous irresponsibility. Blood bank officials had learned five months after Dad's surgery that one of his donors carried the AIDS virus. But they chose to conceal this information. They knew that he was old and in poor health after major heart surgery and expected him to soon die. They were confident their secret would be buried with him. As a result of the blood bank's deadly silence, Mother was later sexually infected with AIDS. Even after doctors diagnosed my father's AIDS-related illness 25 months after his surgery, the coverup continued. The family was still not told. Children and grandchildren were unknowingly exposed to HIV-infected blood and bodily fluids as they cared for the couple without taking precautions. I listened to the eulogy. As the speaker mentioned my father's surviving brothers and sisters, my mind lingered on Darreld, his youngest brother who was the grandfather of another victim of transfusion AIDS. 'How painful this must be for him' I thought. Six months after Dad's heart surgery, Darreld visited my parents, distraught over his two-year-old grandson's recent diagnosis of AIDS. Little Jonathan Swain had contracted the virus from a tainted blood transfusion given after his birth in a Denver hospital. As my uncle talked about his grandson's tragedy, Dad lay on the couch exhausted from the unexplained illness that had dogged him since his surgery. It is incredible that none of us recognized the transfusion connection between Dad and Jonathan's ill health. Nonprofit blood banking is unique. It is a big business receiving free labor from volunteers and free advertising from the news media. Altruistic blood donors provide its raw product in exchange for a glass of juice and a couple of crackers. Because nonprofit blood enterprises operate as local monopolies, they seldom have any competition. They pay no state or federal income tax and are essentially protected from lawsuits. Most people don't realize that this large billion-dollar "nonprofit" industry is, in fact, highly profitablewith greater profit margins than America's largest corporations! Blood banks enjoy the image of charitable organizations. They are the revered institutions that supply the lifesaving gift of blood. Unfortunately, a transfusion that saves a life may later take that life. Orvin's fury had been building for over a week. Now he raged around the hospital like Satan with a toothache. He found Madsen and told him he was taking Dad to the Holy Cross Hospital. Seeing how resolute Orvin was, Madsen did one of his about-faces, this time on the availability of Pentamidine. "It isn't necessary to take him to Salt Lake," he said. "I can get the drug for PCP and treat him right here." "Then why did you tell us you couldn't get it and let him get within an inch of death?" Orvin yelled. "I've had enough of this bullshit. I'm taking him out of here." Madsen tried another approach. The previous day Dad's right leg had become swollen and painful. Tests had indicated he had two blood clots in the veins of his leg. "You can't move him," the doctor said. "It's too dangerous. The ambulance ride could cause a clot to loosen and go to his lungs. It would kill him." "Well, isn't that your objective? You want to stop treatment and let him die," Orvin shot back. "A blood clot would be a much easier death than discontinuing antibiotics and waiting for the end." When my phone rang, Orvin was the angriest man in the state of Utah. "It's been like this for the past six months. Dad's as safe as a cow in the slaughter house. They want to bury this transfusion mistake as soon as possible." Orvin's outraged voice reverberated throughout the room. I held the phone a few inches away from my ear. "In March Madsen couldn't wait to get Dad into the nursing home, away from me, so he could take him off his heart medications. But Dad fooled them and lived. And the last few weeks we've been fed nothing but crap." My head throbbed. It was a medical situation no one should have to face. The blood bank and doctors' long, sorry track record left them without credibility. They could not be trusted and I personally felt much of what Orvin said was true. Ulterior motives had been a factor in Dad's care. It was obvious that we had to get him under the care of a doctor who practiced in a hospital that was not involved in the politics of his case. At 4:00 the next morning, Dad was loaded inside an ambulance. A nurse from intensive care took her place beside him. "You're going to Salt Lake," Orvin told Dad. "I'll be following in the car, right behind you." Dad was far too sick to respond. Three hours later the ambulance pulled up to the emergency entrance of the Holy Cross Hospital. Dr. Kristen Ries, a small woman with a short utility hairstyle was waiting. Instead of the doctors' white coat, she wore a sweater, trousers and sturdy walking shoes. A Utah Physician of the Year recipient, she was considered in medical circles to be one of the city's busiest doctors. Dr. Ries' practice of medicine was influenced by her Quaker upbringing. She was very sensitive to the needs of minorities, often providing care to groups unpopular with some doctors. The elderly had always been one of her major concerns and during the past five years she had cared for many gays who were stricken with AIDS. Her patient load was said to be slanted toward "gays and grays." When Dad was wheeled into the emergency room he was unresponsive and cool all over. Dr. Ries warmed him and administered oxygen. She discontinued the Septra and treated him with Pentamidine. Dad was admitted to the AIDS ward and within a short time showed remarkable improvement. By the next afternoon he was able to talk with Orvin and mentally follow what was on television. Dr. Ries sat on the edge of Dad's bed and hugged him. Hugs were one of her therapies. She had a demeanor that quickly bridged the treatment-trust gap that had so traumatized our family. We never questioned the motives of Dad's new doctors. They never gave us any reason to. Dr. Ries ordered a bronchoscopy so that a small bit of Dad's lung tissue could be studied for diagnosis. "I'm certain your father had has pneumocystis carinii," she said. "But it's probably too late to get a positive test result because of the antibiotics he's been on the past week." Dr. Ries was right - the bronchoscopy results were negative. During the summer of 1987 the CDC had not yet expanded the guidelines for documenting AIDS cases. There was a narrow range of qualifying conditions which included PCP. But what we had not known was that it required documentation by bronchoscopy. "Unlike Madsen told us, bronchoscopy was not needed to get 'the other' drug to treat pneumocystis," Orvin fumed. "It was needed to get counted as a transfusion AIDS case. There was a stall to keep him in Roosevelt where he couldn't be tested and documented. A stall to keep him on a drug he was allergic to." I found myself agreeing with what my brother was saying. I thought back to the previous March when Madsen had treated Dad for a severe allergic reaction to Bactrim, the same drug as Septra. Why had he ever put Dad on Septra instead of Pentamidine? I hung up the phone wondering how Utah's three transfusion AIDS cases had ever lived long enough to be documented. For decades the public was incorrectly led to believe the blood supply was safe. When that safety image was tarnished by AIDS, public health officials and blood bankers formulated a more convincing language. Our family called the verbiage "crock-talk" because it consisted of a barrage of meaningless statistics, ambiguous half-truths and a few blatant lies. For transfusion and clotting factor recipients, safe blood crock-talk became the language of death. A Meaningless Statistic: "The risk of getting AIDS from a blood transfusion is less than one in a million." On August 2, 1983, Dr. Joseph Bove appeared before the House Subcommittee on AIDS. Dr. Bove was chairman of the FDA's Blood Products Advisory Committee and of the American Association of Blood Banks' (AABB) Committee on Transfusion Transmitted Diseases. At the hearings, the doctor presented his charts and tables of the following meaningless statistics which did not have the support of evidence: 1. The risk of getting AIDS from a blood transfusion was less than one in a million. 2. The average American had twice the chance of dying in a flood than from AIDS contracted through a transfusion. 3. A Californian should be twice as concerned about dying in an earthquake as from transfused AIDS. 4. Anyone having an appendicitis operation would have 20 times the chance of death. Dr. Bove did not discuss the chances of a newborn baby and an elderly man from the Swain family both contracting AIDS from transfusions. If asked, I'm sure he would have said the chance was infinitesimal, almost beyond the ability of statisticians to compute. Dr. Bove continued to churn out his creative statistical risks for some time, but by the spring of 1984 his concern had shifted to the danger of bees. Bove told the Wall Street Journal that bee stings kill more people than transfusion AIDS. Orvin is not a statistician but he observed, "There weren't two million Swains in Utah and Colorado." Orvin doubts that there are ten thousand Swains in America. Until testing for AIDS began in early 1985, the one-in- a-million risk was continually parroted by health officials and blood bankers. There were an estimated four million transfusions given in the United States each year with an average of 5.4 component units used for each transfusion. With a one-in-a-million risk, the total HIV (AIDS) infections from the four million transfusions would be four per year. The AIDS virus is believed to have been in the blood supply since 1978. If the one-in-a-million theory were valid, there would have been only 28 transfused AIDS infections given in the seven years before 1985. Instead, a Centers of Disease Control (CDC) study states, "We estimate that 29,000 transfusion recipients of all ages from these years (1978-1984) received a unit of blood infected by HIV." At four million per year, the number of transfusions given during the seven-year period was 28 million from which 29,000 people received infected units. Therefore, according to the CDC study, the risk of getting HIV from a transfusion during these combined years was not one in a million but one in 965! In 1983, during which the CDC estimates 8,400 infections were given, the risk was one in 476. And studies have found that in high-risk cities like Los Angeles it was as high as one in 100. A Misleading Truth: "Less than half the people who receive HIV-infected blood transfusions will get AIDS." This misleading statement is still occasionally heard from health officials and blood bankers. The public is led to believe there is more than a 50/50 chance of surviving a tainted transfusion. That is untrue. Almost everyone who receives a transfusion containing HIV will become infected with the AIDS virus, but approximately 60% will die from their original illnesses within a year. Therefore, over half of those infected will not live long enough to develop AIDS. Yet the public should not be misled into believing that an HIV-contaminated transfusion is inefficient in transmitting AIDS. Dr. Elizabeth Donegan, the lead author of a 1990 medical study, told Associated Press, "It's important not to have any illusions about how infectious HIV is. If it's there in the transfusion, you'll get it." How many patients considering elective surgery would be willing to die early from their illness to avoid getting AIDS from a contaminated transfusion? A Misleading Half Truth: "Concern about the safety of the blood supply is unwarranted except for hemophiliacs and those requiring large amounts of blood." This is an earlier quote of health officials which was often used in the media. Actually there was reason for concern for patients receiving any amount of blood, large or small. But the risk multiplied with each unit received. By leaving much unsaid, the above statement was effective in diverting attention away from prospective surgery patients who were not medically sophisticated enough to recognize the danger they were in. Most Americans are not knowledgeable about the types of surgical procedures that require "large amounts of blood." Our family was not aware that bypass surgery could necessitate the transfusing of up to 50 component units of blood. An Untruth: "I want to assure the American people that the blood supply is 100% safe." This is probably the biggest blood lie of all time, spoken in July 1983 by the country's number one health official, Margaret Heckler, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Compare this to the following statement made by Brian McDonough, President of the Irwin Blood Bank in San Francisco, appearing on ABC TV's "20/20": "The blood supply has never been safe. The public is being told it is safe. This is just not true. Blood is a very dangerous drug." The book Blood, Blood Products and AIDS published by John Hopkins Press lists the known types of infectious agents (germs) that can be given to a patient through transfusion. The viral category includes hepatitis A; hepatitis B; hepatitis non-A, non-B; cytomegalovirus and Epstein-Barr virus. Parasitic diseases that can be spread through the blood supply include: malaria, filariasis, trypanosomiasis, toxoplasmosis and babesiosis. Syphilis is yet another type of infection that can be transmitted through blood transfusion, as can many different disease- causing bacterial organisms. There have been millions of hepatitis infections given by transfusion in the United States during the past two decades. The danger of viral infection escalated with the appearance of retroviruses, and HIV became the most deadly organism in the history of blood banking. There is some concern that another new or "improved" virus could bring the next future disease and repeat the AIDS crisis. It's possible that could be happening in the 1990's. A few patients with an AIDS-like illness are not testing positive for HIV. Is it possible for the blood supply to be 100% safe? No. In fact some experts feel blood transfusions are the biggest obstacle to a safe recovery after surgery. Another Untruth: "The blood supply is safe both for the hemophiliac and for the average citizen who might need it for surgery," Secretary Heckler told the press. Hemophilia is an inherited bleeding disorder which is passed in genetic code from mother to son. A family with hemophilia can have several boys who use Factor VIII, a substance that when injected helps their blood to clot normally. Without treatment, cuts may bleed for days and bleeding into joints can cause crippling deformities. Factor VIII is made from the pooled blood plasma of up to 48,000 donors per batch. Before the clotting factors were pasteurized in 1985, the hemophiliac risk for getting AIDS was horrendous. Such was the tragic fate of the three young Ray boys in Florida who are all infected with HIV. In the Saturday Evening Post, Dr. Theresa Crenshaw, member of the Presidential AIDS Commission assigned to safety in the blood supply, wrote, "Up to 90% of hemophiliacs requiring blood products have become infected with AIDS, and most were infected while the blood industry delayed taking precautionary measures." A Half Truth: "We did all we could," say the blood bankers. "We didn't have a test for AIDS." This statement can be refuted by the fact that they did not use surrogate tests for AIDS and they did not defer gay men from their donor pools at an earlier date. Steps were not taken during the late '70s to implement all available tests for hepatitis. Red Cross experts now admit that had the blood banks been using additional laboratory tests for hepatitis in the early 1980s, half of the AIDS contamination in the blood supply would have been removed even before the presence of the disease was known. Other experts feel considerably more than half would have been removed as AIDS and hepatitis frequented the same high risk groups. In January 1983, the CDC requested a meeting with representatives from the FDA, National Institutes of Health (NIH), American Red Cross, AABB, CCBC and the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. CDC researchers and epidemiologists were alarmed at the mounting evidence that AIDS was contaminating the nation's blood supply. However, they had no authority to take action that would protect transfusion recipients; the blood supply is under the jurisdiction of the FDA. At the meeting, one of the CDC's top virologists, Dr. Thomas Spira, presented evidence to support the CDC's plea for the testing of all blood and blood products with surrogate tests to eliminate donors who were at risk for AIDS. At the time, there was no AIDS-specific test because the virus had not yet been identified. However, the hepatitis B core antibody test could detect donors who had a prior history of hepatitis B. Most gay men and intravenous drug users had such a history. Dr. Spira's test results indicated that the core test could identify 80% to 95% of the patients with AIDS and could be used to eliminate two- thirds of the donors whose behavior put them at high risk for the new disease. The CDC doctors hoped that the blood industry would agree to test all blood or, at the very least, would adopt strict guidelines to prevent people in high-risk groups from donating. As it turned out, neither of these objectives was achieved and the meeting erupted into a fracas. Each group represented had its interests to protect. The FDA group was annoyed because it felt the CDC was trying to usurp its authority over blood policy. At first, the blood bankers chose to deny the existence of an AIDS epidemic and attempted to argue down the CDC evidence. But eventually they focused on the cost of the core test and the loss of what they knew would be 6% of their free product_those donations that would test positive. Blood bankers also insisted that adoption of the test would do nothing to improve blood safety. The refusal to use the core test was not a result of pressure from the gay movement. There were leaders from gay groups present at the Atlanta meeting. They did not object to the testing of blood but strongly opposed the screening of donors. Surrogate testing could have discreetly begun with little opposition from gay groups. The assembly adjourned with no plan of action. Donald Francis, a retrovirologist who directed the CDC's research laboratory on AIDS, was both angry and vocal during the day's discussions. At one point, he pounded the table with his fist and shouted, "How many people have to die? How many deaths do you need?" Nine years later, after he left the employ of the CDC, Dr. Francis talked of the frustration he had felt in early 1983. During testimony before a jury in Denver he said, "It was frustration I had in their inability to accept the reality that AIDS could be transmitted through transfusions. It was something like having a bend in the train track and sitting there, and you hear the whistles and the signals are blinking, and the tracks are beginning to shake, and they're saying, `There's no train coming.'" But there is evidence that suggests blood leaders did realize a train was coming. Three weeks after the Atlanta meeting, Dr. Joseph Bove, whose public stand was that the blood supply was safe with less than a one-in-a-million risk of AIDS, sent his Committee on Transfusion Transmitted Diseases a memo. In his memo Dr. Bove stated that he was certain there would soon be more cases of AIDS contracted from transfusions and he believed that the most blood bankers could do was "buy time." He wrote, "We do not want anything that we do now to be interpreted by society (or by the legal authorities) as agreeing with the concept_as yet unproven_that AIDS can be spread by blood." Dr. Bove's colleagues were urged, "I hope that we are equipped psychologically to continue to act together." Before the memo was written, CDC doctors had informed the blood industry that AIDS was an exploding epidemic and that the virus was transmitted through transfusions and clotting factors. The American Association of Blood Banks' Committee on Transfusion Disease believed transfusion AIDS cases would continue to mount. Yet instead of protecting the public, blood leaders chose to stall while they debated and studied the issue to death. Unfortunately, transfusion and clotting factor recipients could not "buy time." Dr. Francis testified that "tens of thousands of Americans" died because of the blood industry's slow response. In their expos€, "Inside the Billion-Dollar Business of Blood," Money magazine concluded: "The problem is that building an ever-increasing supply of blood feeds the industry's revenues, while taking steps to make blood safer, or to reduce unnecessary transfusions does not. Blood suppliers are looking at the bottom line." Ross D. Eckert is an economics professor who has studied the blood industry and serves on the FDA Blood and Blood Products Committee. In the Reader's Digest special report titled "How Safe is the Blood Supply?" Mr. Eckert is quoted as follows: "Blood banks are portrayed as heroic, altruistic organizations. But in most communities they have been either monopolies or cartels. Tight screening forces them to discard more product which means lost revenues, and to solicit even more donors. That's why they were slow to respond to the AIDS threat." However, the failure of blood banks to use surrogate tests for hepatitis and AIDS before 1987 was also partly due to medical differences of opinion over the seriousness of the two diseases and the cause of AIDS. But probably more significant was the mindset of blood banking leaders forged by 40 years of blood monopoly_a tendency for complacency and an unhealthy resistance to change or criticism. The HIV-specific test for screening out donors infected with AIDS was implemented in March 1985. Two years later, in 1987 the hepatitis B core test was also implemented. Suddenly the test that would do nothing to improve transfusion safety in 1983 was credible. The AIDS crisis had focused public attention on the blood supply. The extremely high post-transfusion hepatitis risk which had been downplayed by the blood industry during the 1970s was attracting media attention. And despite the exemption of blood from product liability, hepatitis and AIDS lawsuits were mounting. Because of increased consumer concern and the threat of litigation, blood banks finally adopted the hepatitis B core test. A Lame Excuse: "But," say the blood bankers, "we didn't know how bad the AIDS threat was. We were dealing with an unknown virus." To a lay person it is inconceivable that doctors and scientists, faced with a killer virus they didn't understand, would have chosen to err on the side of risk rather than on the side of caution. But at the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic, many doctors in the blood industry believed the new disease among gay men and hemophiliacs was an immune disorder caused by frequent exposure to foreign human protein. Some scientists were further confused by the long, variable incubation period between infection and the time AIDS symptoms appeared. They doubted that the illness was caused by a virus. At the beginning of the epidemic these were honest, understandable mistakes. However, the CDC is considered to be the world's most expert organization in combating epidemics. Trained to take swift action, CDC doctors soon became convinced that a virus was the cause of AIDS and that it was transmitted in the same ways as hepatitis B. The CDC scientists presented an urgent warning to blood leaders, accompanied by a plea for adoption of the hepatitis B core test. Blood banking leaders chose to ignore the warning. While initial scientific disagreement is understandable, the lengthy foot-dragging of the blood industry in protecting the blood supply is indefensible. There was a delay of over two years without any testing whatsoever to identify suspect donors_despite a constantly growing mountain of evidence which proved the blood supply was contaminated. The plea by CDC doctors for use of the core test was made on January 4, 1983. Exactly two years to the day later_January 4, 1985_my father was transfused with blood containing both the hepatitis B and AIDS viruses. The core test would have prevented his AIDS death and the HIV infections of many thousands of other transfusion recipients between 1983 and March 1985. The central question is: how much time did blood banking leadership need to buy before changing their "scientific" opinion? A non-expert, responding with common sense instead of the arrogant indifference displayed by the blood monopoly, would have heeded the CDC doctors' warning and traveled the road of caution in early 1983. A Dangerous Exaggeration: "The AIDS antibody test has virtually eliminated any risk of AIDS from the blood supply." This assurance is constantly heard at the present time. Although the risk of getting AIDS in a blood transfusion is significantly reduced, it can still happen. The present antibody test can miss some donors who are positive because there is a "window" between the moment of infection and the time antibodies are developed. During the window period the test will be negative but the donor will be infected and contagious. Usually this window is from two weeks to three months, but in a significant number of cases, it can be up to six months. And a few people may never develop antibodies to the AIDS virus. As a result of some AIDS-positive donors not being detected, health authorities estimate as many as 460 blood recipients a year can be infected with HIV. But the risk from the test's inadequacy must be added to yet another risk: the increasing problems blood banks are having with human and computer error. A medical textbook published by John Hopkins Press reports: "The experience of blood transfusion services over many years is that serious failures in the release of infected donations are more often the result of human error than of an intrinsic inadequacy of laboratory tests." Human error may occur at every stage of testing, particularly in transferring specimens, adding reagents (substances that chemically react to detect other substances) and recording results. When testing for hepatitis and AIDS, the reagents must be of the highest quality and be checked each day to ensure accuracy. The complex computer systems used to track blood from collection to transfusion and to permanently defer infected donors are crucial to blood safety. Any failure in these systems or any data entry errors can cost the lives of blood recipients. Blood banking is a complex business requiring meticulous labeling of blood and safe storage at exact temperatures. Gilbert Gaul, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter on the blood industry, studied FDA records between March 1988 and March 1989. During that year the FDA ordered blood banks and plasma centers to recall nearly 100,000 blood components and medicines because they had been mistakenly released. In April 1990 the FDA ordered Belle Bonfils Blood Center in Denver to recall 11,000 units of blood for retesting. The FDA was afraid the blood might contain either AIDS or hepatitis as a result of incorrect testing. The center's staff had followed the wrong procedures for mixing test chemicals for a period of seven weeks. By the time of recall, 10,670 units (97% of 11,000) had already been transfused into patients at 55 Colorado hospitals. Sample vials of each unit had been kept, but most of them had been discarded before retesting began. Dr. Joel Levine, president of Denver's University Hospital medical board, said the "statistical risk" was that one of the 11,000 pints of blood drawn would be infected with the AIDS virus. Dr. Levine did not explain that if one HIV-infected pint were drawn, it would be divided into at least three component units and given to a minimum of three patients. Neither was the press told that there was a high risk of getting hepatitis from a transfusion of the incorrectly tested blood. For over a week I recorded the meaningless statistics and reassuring half truths that were fed to the Colorado media. Panic was avoided. But our family knows the absence of public panic will be of small comfort to those who will suffer from the blood-borne illnesses resulting from this fiasco in human error. This latest incident was not the first for Belle Bonfils. In 1988 the FDA had reprimanded the center for distributing 22 units of blood despite initial test results showing them to be contaminated. These units were transfused into 45 people. In 1989 a jury ordered Belle Bonfils to pay $5.5 million to a woman who got AIDS from blood supplied in 1985. The center had not tested the blood although it was equipped to do so. Today there is still a risk of getting AIDS from a blood transfusion. The window period allows a few infected units to slip through the test undetected. Furthermore, computers and personnel are prone to make mistakes. Therefore, "virtually every unit" of HIV tainted blood has not been eliminated from the blood supply. The evidence points to a conspiracy of the Red Cross, the two major blood trade organizations and public health authorities to mislead the public on the issue of blood safety and keep the danger of transfusions downplayed. Silence on those dangers predated the arrival of AIDS with the downplaying of astronomical numbers of hepatitis infections given to transfusion recipients during the 1970s. It will be argued that the blood conspiracy is well intended_that it is benign. The malignant consequences suggest otherwise. The blood conspiracy has been vast in its scope, long in its duration and devastating in its results. (Copyright, 1993) The blood industry has worked to suppress this book. While blood scandals in Europe have been reported and leaders tried as criminals, America's scandal has been covered up. Our blood leaders do not want attention focused on safety problems, past or present. Consequently, they lobby against and block the safe-blood legislation that states try to enact to inform patients of transfusion risks and options. Left without knowledge, consumers play Russian roulette when accepting transfusions from the regular banked supply. But there are many medically sound ways to reduce or entirely eliminate these risks. For a FREE REPORT on how consumers can protect their loved ones from contaminated blood transfusions, reply on-line and leave a postal address: CompuServe 74077,2312, Internet ottosenj@mountain.win.net. Or write to Safe Blood, P.O. Box 220, Woodland Park, CO 80866. ------------------------------------------------ (This file was found elsewhere on the Internet and uploaded to the Radio Free Michigan archives by the archive maintainer. All files are ZIP archives for fast download. E-mail bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu) Other sites are invited to mirror these files, with attribution to RFM.