What The Sodomites Have Wreaked: Aids Is Price of Blood Donation

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By Alan Macdermid; Medical Correspondent
The Herald (Glasgow); Pg. 13
January 31, 1997

HUNGRY Third World families who lived by selling their blood to
commercial plasma com-panies are now being wiped out by Aids.

Doctors in Mexico who have watched the tragedy unfold in the ten years
since paid plasma donation was banned there warn in the Lancet today
that the practice may be making a major contribution to the spread of
HIV.

Infection with the Aids virus among donors through re-use of disposable
materials has been reported most recently in China, in 1995. Other
countries include Spain and India.

Dr Patricia Volkow, an infectious diseases specialist in Mexico City,
says that 357 Aids cases among paid donors were reported in Mexico last
year. She and her colleagues studied two families of paid donors who
had been infected and passed the disease on to their sexual partners.

They had undergone plasmapheresis - a process which involves returning
the donor's red cells so that he or she can donate more often - in
centres which did not follow the kind of safety procedures mandatory in
the UK.

In one family the father had encouraged his children to sell plasma for
money. Out of seven of them only one did not sell plasma and he is the
only one still HIV-negative. The others have died of Aids, and all but
two are known to have infected their spouses.

The 22 children they had among them are all healthy but have each lost
one parent and most face the early loss of the second.

In the other family the oldest daughter married a paid donor and came
herself to depend on plasma donation for financial survival. She then
introduced her brother and two sisters to the practice, and they
infected their spouses.

Three died without being informed of their infection status or
receiving any compensation, and the three survivors are HIV positive
and have Hepatitis B or C. Each couple had one healthy child.

Dr Volkow said: "Paid donors represent an important source of blood in
many developing countries and a source of plasma for the fractionation
industry in developed countries.

"The sale of plasma through commercial plasmapheresis facilities is
much more widespread than has been recognised."

Plasmapheresis is practised in Scotland, but - as with all aspects of
blood transfusion - under strict conditions to prevent the possibility
of contamination.

It is normally used on specialist donors whose blood has acquired
highly -prized antibodies with a variety of clinical uses; returning
the donors' red cells enables their life-saving plasma products to be
harvested more often.