Winning of Suit on AIDS-Tainted Blood Could Affect Scores of Cases

A jury’s finding that a local blood bank was negligent in 1983 when it provided tainted blood to an infant who later developed AIDS could affect the outcome of scores of similar lawsuits throughout the country.

In the first such jury verdict against a blood bank in the nation, jurors voted 9 to 3 on Thursday that Irwin Memorial Blood Bank was liable for damages, even though the transfusion took place two years before a test that definitively determines the presence of the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus became available to blood banks.

The jurors awarded $200,000 to the parents of Michael Osborn for past and future medical bills and another $550,000 to the 5-year-old boy, who has a brain tumor and lymphoma and was diagnosed with acquired immune deficiency syndrome last year.

Michael J. Moriarty, the plaintiff’s attorney, said the jury’s decision will probably encourage blood banks throughout the country to settle some of the 200 transfusion-AIDS lawsuits pending against them.

‘It should now be obvious to the blood-banking industry that they are vulnerable to big jury verdicts,” he said.

Gilbert Clark, executive director of the American Assn. of Blood Banks in Arlington, Va., acknowledged that the Osborn suit demonstrated that “when a case gets to a jury, anything can happen.”

But he noted that “the litigation in (transfusion-related AIDS) cases is really just beginning now.”

The only other such lawsuit to reach a jury was decided in favor of a Colorado blood bank a few months ago. Clark said blood banks have won about half a dozen AIDS transfusion lawsuits decided by judges and that another two or three cases have been settled out of court.

In 1983, when the parents of 18-month-old Michael Osborn learned that he would require blood transfusions during open-heart surgery, the couple offered to have friends and family members donate the needed blood.

The Sacramento couple’s offer was refused by the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank, which, like most other blood banks, had a policy at that time that discouraged such “directed donations.”

Duncan Barr, Irwin Memorial’s attorney, questioned whether the Osborn case would have implications for other cases.

“I doubt that there will be many other cases that hinge on the question of directed donations,” he said. “If we had to lose, I am glad it was on a narrow ground like that.”

In any case, Barr said, Irwin will appeal the jury’s verdict.

Changed Policies

Most blood banks have changed their policies and now permit directed donations by families and friends. Clark said “the jury is still out” on whether such directed donations are any safer.

Moriarty, however, insisted that the verdict would have implications for all cases based on transfusions after Feb. 24, 1983--the date Michael received the tainted blood.

The attorney noted that while the AIDS virus had not been discovered at that time, blood banks had been warned by government officials one month earlier that the disease could be spread through blood. Moriarty noted that even in 1983, several “surrogate” tests could have been performed by blood banks to screen out tainted blood, but were not.

As of Monday, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, 2,130 of the nation’s 79,389 reported AIDS cases resulted from transfusions with infected blood. Of those who developed the syndrome from transfusions, 1,376 adults and 102 children have died.

Dr. John Ward, a Centers for Disease Control medical epidemiologist, stressed Friday that almost all of the cases were the result of HIV infections that were contracted before blood used for transfusions began to be routinely screened for the virus in May, 1985.

Today, he said, the Centers for Disease Control’s “worst-case” estimate is that someone receiving a transfusion stands a 1 in 40,000 chance of contracting HIV.