Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2003. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated Press - December 29, 2003
It was the first time that anyone in Japan had been infected with HIV by a blood transfusion since a new screening system was established in 1999, said ministry spokesman Kazunari Tanaka, who added the patient was the only one to receive the tainted blood.
The discovery of the infection came after Red Cross officials found the virus in the blood of a donor. Subsequent checks showed the same donor had given contaminated blood before, but the blood had gone undetected and had been used in a transfusion.
Tanaka said the first donation came in May, at a time in the donor's infection when it was particularly difficult to detect the virus in the blood. The donor, a man in his 20s, made his second donation Nov. 16.
The donor's blood was in three samples. One of them was used in the transfusion, and the other two weren't used, meaning no further infections can result from the donation, Tanaka said.
It was the second time that HIV-tainted blood has passed through a new Red Cross testing system since it was introduced in 1999, but Tanaka said no HIV infections had resulted from the earlier case.
In that case, Red Cross officials said in July the organization had shipped about 6,400 blood products possibly tainted with diseases - HIV, hepatitis or syphilis - to patients across the country and advised recent transfusion recipients to seek follow-up testing.
An earlier blood scandal brought down a Japanese pharmaceutical company, the now defunct Green Cross Corp.
The company was accused of failing to heat-treat imported blood products used to make fibrogen, a blood-clotting drug, in the 1980s - despite widespread knowledge at the time that untreated blood could transmit HIV.
The resulting scandal shook Japan's government and pharmaceutical industry. About 1,800 hemophiliacs were infected, and an estimated 500 have died.
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