AIDS Crisis Hits Home in Canada : Panic: Calls pour in after hospital says children who had transfusions in early ‘80s may have been exposed to HIV.

As he does most mornings in the small Ontario town of Gravenhurst, retired truck driver Barry Jones went down to the local diner Friday morning to have a cup of coffee and shoot the breeze with friends. This time, though, he found a pall hanging over the restaurant.

“Three of the mothers were sitting there sweating,” Jones said, “because their kids had had surgery” at the prestigious Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, about an hour’s drive to the south. “I just laughed at them and said, ‘Welcome to the nightmare.’ ”

The scene in tiny Gravenhurst was played out in coffee shops and at breakfast tables across the province after the hospital announced that children who had come in for surgery in the early 1980s might have been exposed to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The hospital recommended that all early-1980s transfusion recipients--many of whom are now in their teens and early 20s--be tested for AIDS. An estimated 17,000 children received blood at the hospital from 1980 to 1985. The hospital has already learned of 20 who are HIV-positive. Two of these have died of AIDS complications.

For Jones, the announcement had a painfully familiar ring. His wife died of AIDS in 1992, 11 years after getting a tainted transfusion during the birth of their daughter. Before her condition was diagnosed in 1988, she infected Jones.

And Thursday, when the hospital issued its recommendations, it occurred to Jones that his 10-year-old son had had surgery there in 1983 and that his hard-hit family might be at risk of yet another catastrophe.

“I know what every parent at that hospital is going through today,” Jones said. “They’re going to be staring at their kids tonight at the supper table, and saying: ‘My God! Do these kids have AIDS?’ ”

The Hospital for Sick Children, affectionately known throughout Ontario as “Sick Kids,” didn’t do anything unusual in the early 1980s to heighten its patients’ risk of HIV exposure. The blood it used then came from the same source--the Red Cross--as blood used in other hospitals across Canada.

What sets Sick Kids apart is the fact that it has decided to mount a unique drive to alert patients to the risks of transfusions. Sick Kids officials say they know of no other pediatric hospital that has issued a comparable, blanket AIDS alert.

“It was a tough call,” says hospital spokeswoman Claudia Anderson of the decision. “Because we are creating tremendous anxiety, and the risk (of AIDS) is very low.”

The anxiety was manifest on the Sick Kids’ hot line Friday as hundreds of parents flooded a bank of four telephone counselors with a nonstop barrage of phone calls. Most were calling to describe operations their children had undergone in the early 1980s and to find out whether such procedures normally involve transfusions.

Anderson said the hospital had decided to issue the general alert after lengthy deliberations, taking into account that many parents have no idea whether their children receive blood during surgery.

She said that the hospital is increasingly aware that some HIV-positive people can go for 10 years or even longer without showing symptoms and that some patients might be entering their sexually active years without knowing they might be spreading AIDS.

In Gravenhurst, however, Jones was suspicious of such a high-minded explanation.

“Is it a public service? No, to me it looks like damage control,” he said, pointing out that there are numerous lawsuits now pending in Ontario over the issue of tainted blood and AIDS. “Let’s say Sick Kids knew about this 18 months ago. Then why didn’t they tell us about it 18 months ago?”

Jones said that no one had ever told him or his wife that the blood she received during their daughter’s difficult birth might be tainted. Even after her symptoms developed in 1985, he said, no one asked whether she had ever had a transfusion, and in the end it was Jones himself who suggested she get an AIDS test.

Other frequent users of blood products were equally bitter about the Sick Kids’ publicity drive.

“I’m supposed to be happy they’re doing this?” asked Santo Caira of the Canadian Hemophilia Society. “What took them so . . . long?”

Caira pointed out that 47% of Canadian hemophiliacs have been exposed to HIV through tainted blood products and argued that the health profession ought to have been more forthcoming about transfusion risks long ago.

Jones said that while he’s sorry for the Canadian parents who will now be waiting for weeks in fear before getting their children’s AIDS-test results, he thinks the benefits of an informed public far outweigh the costs.

“I’ll bet today’s pay that you’ve got every board of directors at every other hospital meeting today or over the weekend to discuss this,” he said. “A wall of lies and deceit and buck-passing has just been broken.”

At the Hospital for Sick Children, spokeswoman Anderson said: “The issue certainly transcends this hospital. We are small potatoes compared to the number of hospital beds in North America.”