Poison from the prisons
Mar 11th 1999 | LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS
https://www.economist.com/united-states/1999/03/11/poison-from-the-prisons
AT THE end of February, a group of Canadian haemophiliacs infected with HIV and hepatitis C descended on Washington. They want an inquiry into why the United States, particularly the federal Food and Drug Administration, allowed the export of tainted prison plasma from Arkansas and Louisiana to Canada in the 1980s. At the time, Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, and the FDA had already ruled that prison plasma was too unsafe to be used for the manufacture of blood products inside the United States.
In January, the same group filed a $1 billion suit against the Canadian government and companies involved in the plasma production. This month, it plans to bring lawsuits in the $5 billion range which will name the FDA, the states of Arkansas and Louisiana, their prison systems and various medical-care providers for the prison inmates, including Health Management Associates (HMA), which ran the Arkansas prison plasma programme from 1978 to 1994 and also bought prison plasma from Louisiana. The suit may also name the president, if evidence is found that Mr Clinton knew about repeated FDA violations and yet did not shut down the plasma industry in his state's prisons.