Found the article! for Rita Hoffmann

[Guest guest]

The article came from Sat Free Press Winnipeg-July 10th 1999 C 7

Memo indicates data on blood withheld

Paris (AP) Fearing a legal backlash, French health officials purposely failed to notify blood transfusion recipients that they may have contracted AIDS, according to an official document published yesterday.

In a memo dated Dec 13, 1989 and published yesterday by the Le Parisien daily, then top health ministry official -Francois Girard urged caution in tracking down and notifying transfusion recipients.

"Before taking action, consider the consequences," he wrote. " The major risk is a media backlash favoring the demands of the blood recipients and group legal action on their behalf.

Girard, elected president of the World Health Organization 's executive council, is widely regarded as on of Europe's most influential health officials.

The incriminating document strengthens the case against former health minister Claude Evin, recently charged with involuntary homicide for failing to notify blood recipients that they may have contracted AIDS.

Evin is the fourth minister to be tried in the scandal that rocked the French health system in the mid 1980's when 4000 people contracted the AIDS virus from blood transfusion. Hundreds later died.

Charges were filed against Evin, health minister from 1988 and 1991, by the family of Aloncle, who died of AIDS in 1991, and the French Association of Transfused Patients.

Girard told France Inter radio that the two paragraphs , published by Le Parisien were"taken out of context" from a five-page memo outlining the problems of testing blood recipients and providing compensation.

Le Parisien also published an interview with a French medical secretary who said she had offered to help identify blood recipients in 1992 at a hospital in the western French city of Nantes.

"I went to the personnel director and got a shock, I still remember his response: "It's out of the question," Annick Duperring recalled. " I got the distinct feeling that his answer wasn't only in regard to my request, but more generally, to any research on such an explosive issue."

The newspaper said the hospital later published a small notice about the possible blood contamination in a local paper.

Three trials already have been held to determine just who is responsible for the health debacle, but their outcomes have left victims' families angry and frustrated.