The Nation - News from July 7, 1989

Blood plasma tainted with the AIDS virus has been discovered in commercial supplies after a standard blood screening process failed to detect it, researchers said. The discovery means blood contaminated by the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, could infect transfusion patients, said Dr. Jean Pierre Allain, an author of the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. Allain, of Abbott Laboratories in Chicago, and fellow researchers studied 35,000 blood plasma samples collected over two years at two plasma collection centers and found seven to be HIV-infected, a number Allain called “fairly high.” However, officials with the American Red Cross said although the threat of a transfusion recipient being infected is real, the risk is small.