Pauli’s worst fears seem to have been borne out. When investigators moved in on UB Plasma and examined the books, they discovered an alarming discrepancy: 4,500 units of blood may have escaped screening for the AIDS virus. As word of the scandal spread last week, Germany panicked. Everyone remembered the appalling case of tainted blood in France several years ago. Now it seemed a new terrifying episode had hit home. By the thousands, Germans tied up the hot lines of their local health ministries, trying to determine if they should be tested for AIDS. Some worried unnecessarily–like policemen who feared they’d contract the disease from needles used in mandatory hepatitis shots. But people like Roswitha Seglitz, whose 19-year-old daughter is about to undergo her fifth operation for a motorcycle accident, had cause for concern. “The doctors told us the girl wouldn’t survive without a transfusion,” she says. “In the back of your mind, there’s always the fear [of AIDS].”
So far, there are no new incidents of HIV-positive cases reportedly tied to UB Plasma. In October, authorities shut down the company and arrested manager Ulrich Kleist and his associate Bernhard Bentzien on suspicion of violating pharmaceutical laws, of negligently causing bodily injury and deception. Last week police arrested two additional employees. Under interrogation, another employee admitted that the company had pooled blood for testing, says prosecuting attorney Norbert Weise in Koblenz. How widespread is the damage? No one knows. But because UB Plasma sold its products to more than 80 hospitals and clinics nationwide and abroad, tens of thousands of people–including U.S. servicemen who might have received transfusions at a German facility during the last decade–could be at risk. Insurance companies put that number as high as 2 million.
Almost daily, new horror stories and rumors emerged. Prosecutors say a former UB Plasma employee told them that company executives knowingly sold tainted products (she later said that occurred only once). Investigators recently closed a firm in Dessau they said used UB Plasma hemoglobin that hadn’t been properly certified as AIDS-free. They’re also looking into a Munich company that allegedly purchased UB Plasma blood and sold it under its own label. At the weekend, prosecutors in Koblenz denied reports that 500 liters of blood from Romania, where testing is even more lax, had mysteriously gone astray.
The German government is already embroiled in a different AIDS scandal. Health Minister Horst Seehofer recently fired two senior officials in the wake of claims that the Federal Health Office in Berlin failed to help 373 patients who received AIDS-tainted blood from transfusions in the early 1980s, before standardized HIV testing. But Seehofer has been accused of igniting the latest panic by urging everyone in doubt to be tested.
This isn’t the first AIDS scare to hit Europe. In 1985, a French governmental agency wittingly sold off supplies of blood that were HIV-infected. According to internal memos, the National Blood Transfusion Center (CNTS), which controlled a large percentage of hemoglobin products sold in France, ignored studies of hemophiliacs who became HIV-positive. Later the government reportedly spurned deals with U.S. and Austrian companies that had developed heat-treating technologies–the only proven method of destroying the AIDS virus in plasma–in order to protect a small French company that was developing a similar test. But in the most coldhearted decision of all, CNTS reportedly elected not to destroy a sizable stock of unheated blood–1.6 million units–it knew to be HIV-contaminated. With the complicity of the Health and Social Affairs ministries, CNTS vowed to distribute its entire supply of bad blood.
Most victims were hemophiliacs. Of 1,200 or more infected, 300 have died. But there were others as well: patients who underwent coronary bypasses, survivors of auto accidents, women who hemorrhaged while giving birth. During this period the government also collected blood from prison inmates who, it turned out, represented a high proportion of HIV-infected transfusions. The scandal broke in 1988, but four years passed before the case came to trial. Three former publichealth officials did little or no time, and one was acquitted. No major politicians got dragged into the scandal. But France’s voters didn’t forget. In parliamentary elections earlier this year, they routed the governing Socialists–partly because they held them responsible for the AIDS scandal.
The German case may be less morally reprehensible, but could ultimately affect more people. “Given the figures,” says Ulrich Moebius, an analyst at the Institute for Pharmaceutical Information in Berlin, “it will probably be bigger than the French scandal.” Hospitals have made a valiant effort to diminish the AIDS scare. By examining the records of patients who have received transfusions over the last several years, they hope to pinpoint the people who may be infected. But “documentation isn’t so simple,” says Klaus-Jurgen Henning, spokesman at the Federal Health Office. “[Few] doctors write down who gets what blood from what company.
The AIDS scandal seems to have put the entire German health-care system on trial. “People have the impression they can’t trust anybody anymore,” says Dr. Dorothee Siefert, spokeswoman at BadenWurttemberg’s health ministry in Stuttgart. “They can’t trust doctors, they can’t trust the pharmaceutical industry and they can’t trust authorities.” Germans have one of the oldest and most generous health-care programs in the world. But even that safety net is failing to protect them now.
