Japan Activists Urge Action in HIV Blood Scandal

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1995. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Japan Activists Urge Action in HIV Blood Scandal

Reuters (12/12/95)

Some 2,000 Japanese students and labor activists protested outside the Health and Welfare Ministry in Tokyo on Tuesday, demanding that the Health Minister and other officials relinquish their positions for not having done more to stop the use of contaminated blood products in the 1980s. Nineteen -year-old Ryuhei Kawada, a university student who contracted HIV through blood products, implored the government to acknowledge its responsibility in allowing many of the country's hemophiliacs to become HIV-infected by permitting pharmaceutical companies to sell tainted blood products at that time. Statistics from Japan's Health Ministry show that as of August 1995, there were 1,026 cases of AIDS and 2,893 cases of HIV infection. Of the estimated 5,000 hemophiliacs in Japan, 1,803 were infected with HIV and 530 had AIDS.

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