Canadian blood was tainted
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Canada's Health Department knew that blood distributed to haemophiliacs in the 1980s was contaminated with the virus that causes Aids but could do nothing about it, according to a senior official, Greg Smith, AP reports from Ottawa.
'There was nothing to replace it with . . . You had to make some difficult medical choices', he said, between denying transfusions - thereby risking a patient's bleeding to death - or risking the patient developing Aids. A method for purging blood of HIV by heating it was not developed until 1985.
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