Blood scandal's real culprits unmentioned. (News in Brief: Canada).

Ottawa--Five years ago Mr. Justice Horace Krever issued his report on Canada's tainted-blood scandal. During the 1980's, 60,000 Canadians received HIV tainted blood or blood products obtained through the agency of the Canadian Red Cross. Since that time, 24,000 people have been infected with the HIV virus; of these, 2,000 (of whom many are now dead), have contracted AIDS. Many others have fallen ill with hepatitis C.

On November 20, 2002, the RCMP laid a total of 32 charges. These included criminal negligence causing bodily harm. Among those charged are the head of the Red Cross blood program, the Red Cross Society itself, two senior bureaucrats at Health Canada, and a U.S. drug company which manufactured a blood-clotting agent used by haemophiliacs. Its heat treatment, meant to kill the HIV virus in the agent, proved inadequate.

In August 1982, the Canadian Red Cross received the first warning that a virus in the blood could cause AIDS (AIDS was first noted, if not named, by the U.S. Centre for Disease Control in 1981), and claimed its first Canadian victim in January 1982. Health Canada ordered heat treatment of blood products in 1984, but the Red Cross did not implement it until the following year.

The agency was also slow to implement a policy of questioning potential donors on their sexual practices, homosexual and bisexual men having by now been identified as high-risk. They were forced to act by the revelation that an Ottawa man had contracted AIDS from a transfusion of blood given by an HIV positive man who had been donating over several years.

Canadian media recently focused on the laying of the charges and on victims' hopes of seeing justice after many years of suffering. But once again they maintained total silence about the real source of the tainted blood: the community of homosexual activists or "gays," as they call themselves.

Report magazine's Ted Byfield writing in the Edmonton Sun (Nov. 24/02), quotes passages from the report where Krever noted that the Red Cross continued to accept blood donations from homosexuals without questions because it feared accusations of discrimination under the various human rights codes but:

* "The Red Cross's own lawyer advised that it had nothing to fear from the code, but it did have the moral and legal obligation to protect the blood recipient above all." The Red Cross ignored his advice.

* "Some Red Cross doctors earmarked blood from "gay" men anyway so that it could be destroyed. One said he dare not tell head office because he would have been ordered to stop."

* A recommendation that male donors be asked whether they had had sex with another male was rejected on grounds of intolerance. A recommendation that donors be asked if they had AIDS was also rejected. They could only ask: "Are you well?"

The truth is that the Canadian media had begun to accuse anyone who pointed the finger at "gays" for polluting the blood. It is they who ensured the continuation of this disaster.