Drug makers face huge liability in L.A. AIDS case.

Half of hemophiliac population will die, lawyer says

Hemophiliacs and drug companies will undoubtedly be watching the outcome of a wrongful death case recently filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

Alpha Therapeutic Corp., a pharmaceutical company based in L.A., is among three drug companies being sued by the parents of a hemophiliac who died of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in Los Angeles County.

Although most wrongful death suits on behalf of hemophiliacs with AIDS have failed before, this is one of the first cases in which experts can pinpoint the year when the hemophiliac was infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, said Arthur Grebow, the West L.A. lawyer who is representing the parents.

"Drug companies have been able to wiggle out of cases in the past because there have been no specifics on the date of (HIV) infection," said Grebow. "Half the population of hemophiliacs is going to come down with AIDS and die, but drug companies have turned their backs on them."

More than 60 percent of the estimated 20,000 hemophiliacs in the United States were infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) from 1979 to 1985, according to the National Hemophilia Foundation in New York. About 2,000 hemophiliacs have died of AIDS already, according to the foundation.

Grebow said no dollar amount has been decided, but he said an expert will testify that the value of a life is between $1.6 million and $7 million. The jury, however, has the final say on the dollar value of a life, he said.

He said probably 20 to 30 similar cases have been filed, but there have been very few victories for the plaintiffs.

Attorneys for the defendant drug companies were not available for comment, but have successfully defended other clients in such lawsuits by asserting that it is impossible to tell when a hemophiliac was infected with the AIDS virus.

The local civil case is scheduled for trial Jan. 3 in L.A. County Superior Court.

In that case, hemophiliac Josiah Alvarado died of AIDS just before his eight birthday. He was the only child in the family.

His parents, Timothy and Joan Alvarado, are suing Alpha, a division of Green Cross Corp. of Japan; Cutter Biological, a division of Pittsburgh-based Miles Inc.; and Hyland Therapeudics, a division of Deerfield, Ill.-based Baxter International for their son's death.

The defendants are three of the four manufacturers of Factor VIII and Factor IX, blood proteins which enables the blood to coagulate when a hemophiliac suffers a bleeding episode. (Collegeville, Pa.-based Armour Pharmaceutical, a division of France's Rhone-Poulenc Rorer Inc., is the fourth manufacturer.) The blood-protein products are made using donated plasma. As a result, a single AIDS-infected donor could contaminate a number of doses, according to the lawsuit.

Among the charges facing the defendants are failure to warn the public about the potential risk of using their blood-protein products, failure to adequately screen and test donors and inflicting emotional distress.

According to the lawsuit, Josiah Alvarado was infected with the AIDS virus sometime between January and April 1984. The lawsuit also names three experts who will supposedly testify to that time frame. Among those experts listed are the former director of UCLA's AIDS Clinical Research Center and an assistant professor of medicine at the UCLA AIDS center.

What's key about that date is that it is widely accepted by AIDS experts that pharmaceutical companies knew as early as July 1982 that AIDS was a blood-borne disease.

According to the lawsuit, these drug companies failed to put warning labels on their products that were distributed to the public until mid-1984. The lawsuit also charges that the drug companies had the technology to manufacture the blood-clotting drugs by a form of heat treatment in the late 1970s, but they delayed doing so until 1984.

In one of the most serious charges, the plaintiffs claim the Factor IX drug that infected Alvarado with the AIDS virus was developed by Alpha and Hyland in late 1983, using plasma from a high-risk group. The lawsuit charges that the blood product was developed, in part, from the plasma of people in the skid-row mission district of downtown L.A. and from a state prison in Tennessee.

Grebow said the Food and Drug Administration issued a directive to pharmaceutical companies in December 1982 to stop collecting blood from prisons and in certain blighted downtown areas.

The reason it has been so hard to pinpoint when a hemophiliac became infected with the AIDS virus is that most such victims developed "silent infections," said Grebow, meaning they had no physical symptoms.

Alvarado, however, did develop physical symptoms, such as swollen lymph nodes, fever and a rash within eight weeks after using the Factor IX product, Grebow said.

In a similar case, filed in Florida in April 1992, the parents of an 11-year-old hemophiliac who died of AIDS filed a wrongful death suit against Armour Pharmaceutical Co. and won. After a six-day trial, the jury awarded the parents $2 million.

According to court documents, the jury found the boy, Jason Christopher, was infected with the AIDS virus from a Factor VIII concentrate produced and sold by Armour. The jury also found Armour negligent in failing to warn the public about the potential AIDS risk of its product and decided that Armour's negligence was a "proximate cause" of Christopher's death.

In a legal advance for plaintiffs in another similar case, Judge John F. Grady in Chicago ruled that the plaintiffs did not necessarily have to prove which manufacturer made the Factor VIII clotting product.

The lawsuit pending before Judge Grady charges four manufacturers with negligence for not purifying Factor VIII through heat treatment or other methods.