The State - News from Jan. 19, 1988

Four San Francisco-area federal hospitals have ignored a government warning to notify patients who may have received AIDS-tainted blood transfusions between 1978 and 1985, the San Francisco Chronicle said. The hospitals--the Letterman Army Medical Center and Veterans Administration Hospital in San Francisco, the Oakland Naval Hospital and the David Grant Air Force Medical Center in Fairfield--said it either would be too difficult to notify former patients or ineffective to do so. Much of the blood used by the hospitals during the eight years came from the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank in San Francisco where volunteer donations were among the most contaminated in the nation at the time. In March, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta recommended that all hospitals contact patients who had received blood during the period.