Three Japanese Execs Sentenced in HIV Scandal

In a landmark decision that raises the standard for corporate accountability in Japan, an Osaka court Thursday sentenced three former pharmaceutical executives to prison for continuing to sell blood products they knew could be tainted with the AIDS virus even after safer substitutes were available.

The bluntly worded verdict marks the first time a Japanese drug company executive has received a prison sentence for professional negligence in connection with harmful drugs, legal experts said. The decision is seen as precedent-setting in a country where an ill-defined system of collective responsibility among government, industry and medical officials has often made it impossible to hold any individual or institution accountable.

Nearly 1,500 Japanese, mostly hemophiliacs, were infected with HIV after using unsterilized blood products, according to government statistics. As of January, 493 of them had died of AIDS complications. The Green Cross pharmaceutical firm--whose executives were sentenced Thursday--at least three other drug companies, the Health and Welfare Ministry and others have faced hundreds of lawsuits from the victims and their families.

In a historical irony that has largely been ignored by the mainstream Japanese media, Green Cross was founded after World War II by high-ranking alumni of Imperial Japan’s biological warfare program. At least three early Green Cross executives are known to have conducted hideous medical experiments on prisoners and civilians during the war, killing hundreds or thousands, according to Western and Japanese historians. The men received amnesties from the U.S. occupation authorities in exchange for their medical data.

Five decades later, their corporate successors were found guilty of having “put a priority on profits and ignored the dangers” by marketing products they knew could transmit HIV, the three-judge panel ruled Thursday.

The three men convicted Thursday had each served as president of Green Cross, and all pleaded guilty to professional negligence in 1997. The judges gave a two-year jail term to Renzo Matsushita, 79, who joined Green Cross after retirement from the Health Ministry in a controversial but continuing practice. Called “descent from heaven,” it is seen as fostering corruption because regulators may coddle companies that will later offer them cushy post-retirement jobs in which they might lobby former subordinates.

Tadakazu Suyama, 72, who was the Green Cross vice president during the scandal, was given an 18-month prison term, and Takehiko Kawano, 69, was sentenced to 16 months. All three are appealing the decision.

The criminal case dealt with the 1995 death of a liver patient in his 40s who received an injection of an unsterilized Green Cross clotting agent in April 1986--three months after Green Cross had started marketing a safer, heat-treated version of the same product.

“For a company president or vice president to be convicted on criminal charges over the death of just one person is extremely rare in Japan,” said Tsutomu Shimizu, an attorney for the victims.

Some of the surviving victims called the sentences too short, and critics said the ruling is only a first step toward remedying ethical problems within the Japanese regulatory and medical establishments.

When the blood scandal came to light in the early 1990s, the public was shocked to learn of the Health Ministry’s failure to protect the Japanese blood supply--and of the cozy and collusive ties between regulators, the pharmaceutical industry and the medical establishment.

According to Shimizu, Matsushita, as a young bureaucrat, had handled negotiations with victims of an earlier medical scandal: Japan’s failure to halt sales of the drug thalidomide even after U.S. regulators banned it because it caused birth defects. Victims of the tainted blood argued that Matsushita should have been particularly sensitive to warnings sounded in the early 1980s about HIV contamination.

The court found the former Green Cross executives guilty of false advertising for telling customers in 1986 that the unsterilized blood product was safe because it was made from Japanese domestic blood--a lie that took advantage of the common Japanese view of AIDS as a foreigners’ disease.

Moreover, the court wrote that even if the Health Ministry were to be found negligent in failing to order a recall of the HIV-tainted product, it is the manufacturer that bears “first and last responsibility for ensuring product safety.”

Criminal trials are ongoing for a former Health Ministry official and a former leading medical school vice president who was advising the ministry.

Green Cross has paid about $216 million in compensation to victims, and its shareholders are suing the three convicted executives for repayment of that money. Green Cross was absorbed in 1998 by Yoshitomi Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.

Yoshitomi released a statement Thursday repeating its apology to victims or their families and promising to do its utmost to ensure that such a tragedy is never repeated.

Historian Sheldon Harris, professor emeritus at Cal State Northridge and author of a landmark study of Japan’s biological warfare program, charged that there is a “direct moral linkage” between the behavior of the scientists in the wartime Unit 731 and the reckless disregard their successors showed for the hemophiliacs who were dependent on their products.

“These people had a totally callous attitude toward the health and welfare of sick people,” Harris said in a telephone interview.

Doctors and scientists known to have killed human subjects in Unit 731 enjoyed illustrious postwar careers--not only at Green Cross but at other drug companies, medical schools, research laboratories and government agencies.

In a 1996 interview, Green Cross spokesman Yoshiyuki Yatsuyanagi rejected any connection in fact or attitude between the wartime deeds of the Green Cross founders and the blood products scandal.

“It is true that our company founders included people involved with Unit 731, but over decades, many other managers have come to work here, and to say the HIV problem was caused by 731 is completely impossible to substantiate,” Yatsuyanagi said. “No one knows the facts. It’s like trying to grab a cloud.”