The Nation - News from Sept. 28, 1987

There is no significant risk that a person can contract the AIDS virus from RhoGam or other medicines derived from blood plasma, the Food and Drug Administration said. The agency, along with RhoGam’s manufacturer, Ortho Diagnostic Systems Inc., is investigating allegations that an enlisted Army woman and her baby may have contracted AIDS from the drug used to prevent a rare condition of blood incompatibility in some pregnant women and their unborn children. “In the past 20 years, about 500,000 doses of RhoGam have been given in the United States each year with no documented transmission of any infectious disease,” the FDA statement said. The FDA noted that even if the AIDS virus had been present in any of the raw material used to make RhoGam, an alcohol fractionation method used to make the drug would have killed the virus.