3 Childrens Hospital Patients Reported to Have AIDS Virus

Three children who received blood transfusions at Childrens Hospital of Orange County have been infected with the AIDS virus, the hospital’s chief of infectious diseases said Tuesday.

One of the three has developed early symptoms of the fatal disease, Dr. David J. Lang said. The three infected children were identified after a Red Cross investigation that backtracked the tainted blood from donors who were subsequently found to have acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Lang made the disclosure Tuesday while requesting that parents of all children who received blood transfusions at the Orange hospital from 1978 to March, 1985, contact the hospital to arrange for the children to be tested for the AIDS virus.

“I don’t want people to be panic-stricken, because the number of children that will test positive for the virus will be very small,” Lang said.

But Lang acknowledged that the hospital has been flooded with 100 calls in the three days it has operated a special telephone line for parents who are concerned that their children may have received AIDS-tainted blood.

So far the hospital staff has only been able to review the files of the children of the first 70 callers, Lang said. Twenty of these callers definitely knew that their children had received blood transfusions while at Childrens Hospital, Lang said.

The remaining 50 were unsure, and a review of their children’s records indicated that the children indeed had received transfusions while hospitalized, Lang said.

“If the preliminary numbers mean anything, then we can generalize that as many as 60% of the parents do not know if their children have received blood products,” Lang said.

This uncertainty, Lang said, arises because parents are not routinely notified of transfusions once they sign a treatment release form.

Parents who are unsure whether their children received blood products while in the hospital are encouraged to call the special number to find out, Lang said.

That number is (714) 532-8686. The line is staffed Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.

If a review of a child’s medical record shows that the child did receive a blood transfusion, Lang said the hospital is following recommendations from the Orange County Department of Health and the federal Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and telling parents to have the child tested for exposure to the AIDS virus.

“We anticipate that the number of children who have received infected blood will be small,” Lang said. Citing figures from the Orange County Red Cross, Lang said that of the people now donating blood, just one in 8,000 to 10,000 test positive for the AIDS virus.

But Lang acknowledged that the risk of infection was greater from 1978 to March, 1985, which is the period that Childrens Hospital is concerned about. He said the hospital is unsure how many children received blood during that period.

From 1978, when AIDS emerged in this country, to March, 1985, when testing of donated blood for the AIDS virus became routine, blood banks primarily had to trust that such high-risk groups as homosexuals and intravenous drug users would abstain from donating blood, Lang said.

He said he believed that the risk of children being infected by blood from Orange County donors, which is used by Childrens Hospital, is less than it was for blood donated by people from Los Angeles County.

Lang said he was drawing the distinction between blood from Orange County donors and Los Angeles County donors because of the high incidence of AIDS in newborn babies who received transfusions that was reported earlier this month by Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

At a Nov. 13 press conference, a Cedars-Sinai spokesman said three infants had died from transfusion-related AIDS in 1980-85. The spokesman, Dr. Thomas Mundy, did not specify how many newborns had actually been infected and merely gave an estimate of 2% to 5%.

But the day after the press conference, Mundy acknowledged the existence of a second study that showed Cedars had found 21 cases of AIDS virus infections in newborns through blood transfusions in 1980-85, including five who died of the disease.

The week after the Cedars disclosure, Lang said Childrens Hospital was inundated with calls from worried parents, prompting it to set up its special telephone line last Friday.

Lang said the hospital is also going back through its records and trying to identify the children who received blood transfusions before testing of blood products became mandatory in the spring of 1985.