Dr Trevor Mudge, AMA Vice President, with Jo Mazzocchi, ABC Radio 'PM'
COMPERE: For more than a decade officials from Australia's blood bank boasted that we led the world in screening out blood from hepatitis sufferers. But tonight that claim is in tatters with the revelation that blood products, believed to be infected with the hepatitis C virus, were knowingly put into circulation in Australia. Hepatitis C can be fatal. The Federal Health Minister today ordered her department to conduct an investigation. The key decisions were made in 1990 by representatives of the then Federal Department of Health, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories and the Red Cross in accordance with international advice. At the time it was believed the virus could be killed but that was reconsidered and reversed after only a few months.
MAZZOCCHI: Today it would breach all internationally accepted standards for blood safety but back in 1990, very little was known about hepatitis C and its potentially fatal consequences. At least that's the view according to those involved in making this decision. But new allegations have emerged today that donors who tested positive for hepatitis C in 1990, were actively encouraged to give blood. The potentially infected plasma was sent to the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, which turned it into blood products like Factor-8, which is used by haemophiliacs and although contaminated blood was used as an ingredient in blood products for only short time, a matter of months, the question is - why was it used at all? Professor Yvonne Cossart from Sydney University's Infectious Diseases Department says the decision has to be seen in the context of the time.
COSSART: For people who were positive, the blood was of course not used for transfusion directly, but it was put aside for processing into blood products.
MAZZOCCHI: That's an important distinction isn't it?
COSSART: It's very important because the purification process was believed to inactivate viruses. And indeed, it certainly does inactivate viruses, and so far as we'd known it was really difficult to get any evidence of hepatitis C being transmitted by the blood products as opposed to whole blood.
MAZZOCCHI: Was there a lot of debate though, within the medical fraternity here in Australia about what should be done with this contaminated blood?
COSSART: I don't they thought it was a risky procedure or they wouldn't have done it. We thought that the processing gave recipients protection. There were no cases being reported as a result of the use of blood products. So when you combine those two, it was hard to get any figure of risk.
MAZZOCCHI: An estimated 20,000 Australians may have acquired hepatitis C through tainted blood. And now a support group for people infected with diseases from blood transfusions has called for a full commission of inquiry into the Australian Red Cross Blood Service. The Tainted Blood Product Action Group says a full inquiry would shed light on why the decision was made in the first place. But the Federal Health Minister, Kay Patterson has called for a departmental report. The group's spokesman, Charles McKenzie says a full inquiry is needed.
McKENZIE: People who've been injured in the 1990s with blood products and also because there are always two tenets to blood safety. We've know about them since the 1980s, and they are these, donor screening - you screen out the risky donors and donor testing - you test to make sure that the ones we haven't screened out, do not have a virus. They're the two tenets, you cannot use one without the other.
MAZZOCCHI: But the vice-president of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Trevor Mudge says there are always risks involved in any medical procedure.
MUDGE: You can't eliminate risk entirely in life or indeed in medicine. You can certainly minimise it but there's a balance here.
MAZZOCCHI: That's very true, but this is a time when HIV AIDS was certainly reaching a peak in most Western countries, and so it begs the question, why weren't these health professionals more suspicious about what they were doing?
MUDGE: I think if you look back at the literature at that time, there was a great deal of suspicion of the potential of blood transfusions to transmit virally-born diseases, including those virally-born conditions that we didn't then know about, and therefore couldn't test for.
MAZZOCCHI: Why wasn't there greater scrutiny of what was going on?
MUDGE: The answer is not to give people blood, and then you'll have people dying for want of a blood transfusion. That's the difficult balance. Blood transfusion is important, it shouldn't be used willy nilly, but it does save peoples' lives.
MAZZOCCHI: Dr Mudge, you're also chairman of the AMA's ethics committee, what is your view that this sort of detail is only being made public now?
MUDGE: I think it's very hard indeed to know who did what exactly and when. But I mean...
MAZZOCCHI: Do you think the public has the right to know?
MUDGE: Of course the public has the right to know.
MAZZOCCHI: Why haven't they been told sooner?
MUDGE: This is...we don't know the facts of the situation. These are allegations being made by a lobby group and we don't what the real facts are. Certainly, it should be looked into. I'm not saying that for a minute. But I do think it's important that society remembers that, nothing in life is free of risk and though we can minimise risk, it comes at a cost, and it's minimisation and not elimination of that risk.
Ends