AIDS from USA?, WTF? o_O Options

[HyPN0]

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[Foster]

Oh, the factor VIII thing again... yeah, I remember when this first popped up on my radar back in the 90s (I was taught about it in Biology). Basically factor VIII is part of your clotting mechanism - heamophiliacs don't have it, so they bleed. It's not actually a medicine of sorts, it's actually a blood factor that everybody has. Apart from heamophiliacs.

Now, the problem arises because in the US they didn't screen blood donors properly. In the US, you give blood, you get money. So you generally get the people that need the money giving blood, which means you often get infected crap. Obviously this has been tightened and changed now, but that's where the problem lies.

The EU countries DO have their own version of the FDA. Generally these are independant in the member states, but do have to have certain levels of excellence attained which allows cross-trading. The UK system is very much more complicated, so I'm not going to go into detail on it (because it is all about keeping things cheap, as it is the only country with sole state sponsored healthcare), but this doesn't actually matter. What you have is a system frequently used called parallel imports. So, for example your antibiotic could be made in Poland, imported to, say, France (bad example because unlike most nations, the French like to take nearly all their drugs in suppository form), and as long as it passes the regulations regarding content and packaging, both of which are rigourous, it goes through.

Tests are carried out by the manufactuers to a set standard. Obviously they can't test everything (or you'd get no product), but they can test a bit of the batch. This is where the problem must have arisen. Now, at the time there was not enough blood donation, so some of the things obtained by donated blood, such as Factor VIII, were imported from elsewhere.

Could it happen today? Probably not. But then again they thought it couldn't happen then. I suppose the reason they are bringing it up is because they've finally got enough to sue. Problem is I imagine most of the infected are dead.

This post has been edited by Foster: Jun 1 2006, 12:18 PM