Being Alive; November 1997
Fran McDonald

Many of you are aware of the legal settlement reached earlier this year by four drug companies and the litigants in a class-action suit establishing a $640 million fund for victims of the drug companies' tainted blood products; the suit was brought in 1994 by thousands of people with hemophilia. To date over 4,000 of those plaintiffs are dead, and if you said that the approximate $100,000 each plaintiff, or his survivor, is to receive is inadequate, I'd agree. Although the companies admit no wrong-doing and in making the settlement do not even suggest negligence, ever since this scandal came to light over a dozen years ago I have felt that "wrong-going" and "negligence" have nothing to do with it. "Murder" is the word I used then, just as I do now.

No wonder, then, I took notice that Elaine DePrince states in her new book, Cry Bloody Murder: A Tale of Tainted Blood, that the FDA, the blood-banking industry, and the four drug companies named in the lawsuit are guilty of murdering her two sons, both with hemophilia who died of AIDS (at ages 12 and 15) contracted through tainted blood. The early part of this horror story is documents in Randy Shilts's epic And the Band Played On. Mrs. DePrince takes the story to the present in a meticulously researched and documented book that will alternately scare the wits out of you and then thoroughly enrage you. Most frightening of all are the instances when individuals and companies knew (or even had good reason to suspect) that blood products were contaminated, and yet continued to flood the market with them. The apparent impunity of these individuals and companies certainly makes a mockery of the word justice.

In addition to the book, the June 15 issue of the New Yorker had an excellent article by the noted author Robert K. Massie (himself the father of a son who is HIV+ as a result of a tainted transfusion), an interview/review of DePrince and her book-I recommend it to you. If you'd like a copy, please call me. The DePrince book has just been published by Random House and is in book stores now. (Incidentally, the four drug companies are Alpha Therapeutic Corp., Armour Pharmaceutical Co., Bayer, and Baxter Healthcare Corp.)

Flu Update

Last month I urged you to ask your doctor about the advisability of getting a flu shot, and since then several doctors have called me to emphasize the urgency of this, especially in light of the death last May of a boy in Hong Kong from a strain of pneumonia similar to that of the great flu epidemics of 1918 and 1957. A worldwide watch is now in effect for any other sign of this strain, which would require the immediate reconfiguration of the flu shot "cocktail."

In addition, there is concern among many doctors regarding the high incidence of resistance by flu strains to antibiotics. (In 1980 only one known strain was resistant to antibiotics; now over 500 strains are resistant.) Also, there is a "super-strain" of pneumonia resistant to penicillin that now accounts in some places for two-thirds of pneumonia cases. This is no trifling matter, so please talk to your doctor at once. And remember that L.A. County Health Services is offering flu shots free: call them at 213.250.8055.

Fran McDonald has been in social services for 27 years and welcomes your calls at 213.664.4772.

See also: Bits and Pieces: Aug./Sept. '97

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