Red Cross, ministry hit for blood case handling
September 06, 2005 ㅡ An opposition National Assemblywoman yesterday faulted the Korean Red Cross and the Ministry of Health for what she said was an attempt to cover up the transfusion of HIV-tainted blood to an accident victim. Representative Ko Kyung-hwa of the Grand National Party complained that the ministry and the Red Cross had both tried to hide the incident from the public.
A 23-year-old college student donated blood at a Red Cross center in Incheon on April 20; the screening test showed an HIV infection. The Red Cross looked into the donor’s history, the lawmaker said, and discovered an earlier blood donation, last December, but with no sign of HIV infection.
Presumably, that was because the screening test used at the time could detect signs of HIV infection only about three weeks after the victim became infected. The new, more sensitive test, can detect an infection after only 11 days.
Ms. Ko said the Red Cross discovered that part of the blood from that December donation had been used for a transfusion of red blood cells to a traffic accident victim, who died the following day from her injuries. Blood serum from that donation was sent to two drug companies for processing. After the donor’s HIV infection was found, the Red Cross notified the companies through the Korean Food and Drug Administration. One company had not yet used the serum and destroyed it; the other had processed the serum into albumin drugs, a process that kills any HIV virus that might be present.
But, Ms. Ko complained, that was not good enough. The Red Cross did not notify the Health Ministry of the matter until six weeks after the second donation, and it reported only the processed serum, not the red blood cell transfusion. The Health Ministry, in turn, found out about the transfusion on July 18, but did not inform the public until forced to by Ms. Ko’s revelation.
“The death of the woman [after the traffic accident] had nothing to do with the AIDS virus and this kind of incident is very rare,” a ministry official said.