A Mother’s Rage Against Bad Blood : CRY BLOODY MURDER: A Tale of Tainted Blood, by Elaine DePrince (Random House; $23,203 pages)

Between World War II and the outbreak of AIDS in the early 1980s, Americans with hemophilia enjoyed what Elaine DePrince calls a “golden moment.” Once life-threatening “bleeds” could be controlled with injections of “clotting factors” manufactured from blood plasma. Hemophiliacs’ life expectancy soared. Their range of activity, at work and play, broadened.

Things weren’t perfect. For example, a person who used clotting factors had almost a 100% chance of catching hepatitis. Pharmaceutical companies (Alpha, Armour, Baxter and Bayer, and their subsidiaries) made the stuff from plasma “pooled” from tens of thousands of donors, including Haitians, prison inmates and residents of drug-ridden slums. Just one infected donor could contaminate a whole batch of clotting factor with virus.

Couldn’t a hemophiliac who caught hepatitis from impure blood products sue the manufacturer? Well, no. Legislatures in 47 states--California was the first, in 1955--quietly adopted “blood-shield laws” that exempted makers of blood products from the “strict product liability” that applies to makers of such things as automobiles and toys. Under these laws, manufacturers could sue their sources of tainted plasma, but patients couldn’t sue the manufacturers.

The doctors who treated hemophiliacs, and their own advocacy group, the National Hemophilia Foundation, advised them that the benefits of clotting factors outweighed the risks, DePrince says--even after it became known that AIDS could be transmitted by blood and blood products.

The result: “By 1988, more than half the hemophiliacs in the United States were infected with HIV. By 1994, the median life span of a hemophiliac was back to what it had been in 1966.”

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In plain terms, more than 10,000 people were condemned to death by the products they had counted on to help them live. In the terms that matter most to DePrince, a New Jersey teacher-activist, clotting factors contaminated with HIV killed two of her five sons--Cubby at 11 and Mike at 15. A third son, Teddy, also has HIV but his infection has been been stabilized.

“I wanted to die after the deaths of my sons,” says DePrince, who instead threw herself into lobbying the New Jersey legislature to extend the statute of limitations on suits seeking compensation for such deaths. “I realized that living with anger is less painful than living with grief.”

This book is an outgrowth of both emotions. It’s a memoir of the joy- and crisis-filled daily life of a family in which everyone except DePrince’s husband, Charles, had some form of hemophilia. Especially moving is her account of the death of Cubby, a child of rare grace and awareness.

It’s also a harsh, dry-eyed, carefully researched indictment--not of the doctors, whom DePrince sees as sincere, if often misinformed, nor of the Hemophilia Foundation, though she charges that its pro-clotting factor stance was influenced by subsidies from the blood-products industry, but of the makers themselves, who she says knowingly sacrificed lives for profit.

Is it only coincidence, DePrince asks, that blood-shield laws were passed around the time clotting factors came on the market? She argues that the makers had the technology to screen plasma donations for hepatitis virus well before they made a serious effort to clean up their supply. She says a German firm developed an effective plasma-purifying method in advance of the AIDS epidemic, but U.S. firms balked at adopting it because of the trouble and expense.

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An indictment isn’t a verdict, just a determination that a trial ought to be held. Given DePrince’s experiences, we can’t expect “Cry Bloody Murder” to be an objective book. The pharmaceutical companies (except for a few smoking-gun memos introduced as evidence in lawsuits brought by hemophiliacs--the kind of memos we have lately come to associate with tobacco firms) don’t get much of a say here.

Still, as indictments go, this one is hard to ignore. DePrince makes a strong enough case for us to say: There should be a trial, at least in the court of public opinion--if only for the sake of Cubby, whose “64 Reasons Why You Do Not Want to Get AIDS” closes the book:

“6. Oral thrush makes your tongue look gross. . . .

“21. You don’t grow. . . .

“31. The pain in your bones makes you feel like an old person. . . .

“46. If your liver gets too big, you can’t lie down to sleep at night or your heart and lungs get crushed. . . .

“56. You worry about whether your dog will be OK when you die. . . .

“62. You do a lot of important things because you have to squeeze them into a short time like 10 or 11 years instead of 87.”