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...official response did little to calm fears. Health Minister Horst Seehofer recommended that anybody who had received blood products since 1982 undergo a test for HIV -- which caused a run on testing sites. Hospitals were laboriously checking records to identify patients who received blood from UB Plasma, but the task was huge and the records were not always clear on the source of the products used...
Investigators discovered that after UB Plasma began running into financial trouble two years ago, technicians were told to pool units to save money on the $2 test kits. When the German manufacturer of the kits stopped deliveries because UB Plasma was not paying its bills, technicians switched to an unauthorized and even less reliable test. There was also chilling evidence that the firm may have distributed blood that was not screened...
When the extent of the violations became clear in October, the authorities moved quickly to shut down UB Plasma. They arrested the manager and three employees on charges of fraud and "negligent bodily harm." Last week they began tracing batches of company blood distributed to at least 88 hospitals and four companies in Germany and abroad. Three cases of HIV have been attributed to tainted blood, but a prominent pharmacologist, Ulrich Moebius, warned there may be more. "This," he said, "is only the tip of the iceberg...
...news of potential contamination of Germany's blood supply hit like a bombshell in a country already shocked by a decade-old scandal implicating negligent health officials in a cover-up of HIV-infected blood. The reports of HIV cases from UB Plasma blood raised fears among millions who had received transfusions over the past eight years. Hospitals were flooded with calls from former patients, and health administrators faced a rash of cancellations of elective surgery. "People aren't just afraid, they're panicking," said Erhard Seifried of the German Red Cross...
German officials may be guilty of laxity in policing the blood industry, especially UB Plasma. From 1985 to 1989 the firm operated without a license by exploiting a loophole in the law permitting production of small batches of plasma with case-by-case approval. In 1987 a UB Plasma worker told government officials that the company was distributing questionable blood products. The company's recent poor financial condition went unnoticed by regulators...