Criminal Charges Laid
in Canadian Blood Scandal
Excerpt By Amran Abocar, Reuter's Health

TORONTO (Reuters) - Police laid criminal charges against four doctors, the Canadian Red Cross Society and a US pharmaceutical company on Wednesday after a five-year investigation into the country's tainted blood tragedy of the 1980s.

During that decade, thousands of blood transfusion recipients in Canada contracted the AIDS and hepatitis C viruses from contaminated blood and blood products. Many of them have died.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said the accused failed to inform the public about the risk of HIV and hepatitis infections from unscreened blood and also failed to test donated blood for the hepatitis C virus.

The charges include criminal negligence causing bodily harm, which carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence.

"We're the walking wounded that are left alive and what happened to us will never go away," said Mike McCarthy, the former vice-president of the Canadian Hemophiliacs Society, after the Mounties' news conference.

"But it's better to have justice served cold than no justice at all."

McCarthy said he contracted hepatitis C in 1984 from tainted blood collected from a US prison.

"It validates (the knowledge) that my infection was not brought on by God but by a man-made decision that placed money over my safety," said McCarthy, on the verge of tears.

The Mounties charged two senior doctors who worked in the government's Health Protection Branch and the former director of the Red Cross blood transfusion service as well as the organization itself.

In the United States, it charged Armor Pharmaceutical Co., a Delaware-registered company, and a doctor who served as a vice-president of the firm.

An estimated 2,000 Canadians were infected with HIV before the Red Cross started testing blood. Thousands of others have been infected with hepatitis C, a debilitating and often deadly liver disease, with estimates ranging as high as 60,000.

"This isn't going to solve my problems with HIV and hepatitis C, this isn't going to bring back dead friends," said John Plater, a lawyer infected in the 1980s.

"There's some satisfaction to see we were right all along, that there was a criminal element to what happened (but) it's mixed emotion."

CALLS FOR COMPENSATION

In laying the criminal charges, the Mounties extended their investigation back as far as 1980--a development that blood victims and their advocates say should make the federal government offer compensation.

"The RCMP got their men and now it's up to the prime minister to stand up and be a man himself and provide help for those forgotten victims," McCarthy said.

Four years ago, Canada's federal and provincial governments agreed to a C$1.1 billion ($692 million) compensation plan for those who were infected with hepatitis C from tainted Red Cross blood.

But the package did not cover those afflicted before 1986, the year that comprehensive testing of blood supplies began in the United States.

"There's an opportunity here for the government to compensate those people," said Jeremy Beaty, former chairman of the Hepatitis C Society of Canada. "The money's there."

The Mounties said their investigation continues and more charges may be laid.

Reference Source 89

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