TOKYO, March 4, 2008 (AFP) - A Japanese member of parliament who is one of the country's most prominent people living with HIV said on Tuesday that he has married.
Ryuhei Kawada, 32, said he married Mika Tsutsumi, a journalist and anchorwoman.
"I never thought that I would live long," Kawada said next to his wife at a press conference. "But for the first time in my life, I've wanted to live long, even a day longer than Mika."
Kawada, a haemophiliac who was infected with HIV through tainted blood, was among a group of plaintiffs who sued the government in 1989 for failing to take action to prevent tainted blood products from being distributed.
Infected with the virus when he was young, Kawada turned into an icon of the court battles because at age 19 he became the first victim to come forward using his real name.
Tsutsumi formerly studied and worked in New York. She became known for her writing about the September 11 terrorist attacks and about poverty in the United States.
The tainted blood infected 1,430 people with HIV between the late 1970s and 1986. More than 500 of them have died.
Kawada won a seat in parliament in last year's upper house elections. He ran as an independent, vowing to use his role as a lawmaker to "fight irresponsible bureaucracy."
On Tuesday, Japan's Supreme Court said it had rejected an appeal by the first bureaucrat found negligent in the tainted blood affair.
Akihito Matsumura, 66, who headed the health ministry's biologics division from July 1984 to June 1986, had appealed his 2001 conviction in connection with one of the AIDS deaths.
The defendant was "in the central position in the ministry to take measures on the AIDS problem due to unheated blood products," presiding Judge Yuki Furuta said in the ruling made Monday but released a day later.
"He had the duty to take substantial measures. He was responsible," he said.
Matsumura received a one-year prison term, with another two years of the sentence being suspended. Japanese courts frequently show leniency by suspending sentences.
Lower courts had found Matsumura negligent for failing to stop the use of HIV-contaminated blood to treat a liver patient who was infected in April 1986 and later died.
But lower courts had ruled that Matsumura could not bear responsibility for the death of a haemophiliac who contracted HIV during treatment in May or June of 1985.
Kawada praised the ruling, saying: "It's good that the criminal case brought a guilty verdict."
"But I don't understand why he was found not guilty for part of the charges," he said.
An estimated 33.2 million people are living with AIDS or HIV, the UN agency UNAIDS says.
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