SATURDAY , 24 APRIL 2004
By YVONNE MARTIN
Blood was collected from prisoners for the national blood bank for more than a
decade after some countries declared the practice too dangerous.
Mobile blood units were sent around prisons collecting donations from willing inmates, now known to have endemic rates of hepatitis C due to drug use.
New Zealand stopped taking blood from prisoners for safety reasons in the early 1980s. Canada, and some Australian states, had already ceased collecting blood from prisons in the 1970s.
The shocked Haemophilia Foundation, which was unaware of the practice until told by the Weekend Press this week, wants a public inquiry.
It is also calling for police to reopen inquiries into complaints of criminal nuisance against former health ministers Helen Clark and Simon Upton made by haemophiliacs infected with hepatitis C.
"This has never been known. Members are going to be horrified," said foundation president Mike Carnahan.
"What else don't we know? Once again, members are going to feel violated and let down.
"It's time we had an inquiry, simply because we don't know what else is lurking here."
Last Saturday on World Haemophilia Day, the foundation revealed how members infected with hepatitis C virus through tainted blood products were getting sicker and dying. Yet they were effectively barred from a $7 million Government compensation package because they could not prove when they were infected.
The compensation is on offer because screening tests to detect hepatitis C in donated blood, commercially available in 1990, were not introduced nationally for another two years.
More than 700 people are believed to have contracted the hepatitis virus and more than 20 have since died, in what has been dubbed the bad blood scandal.
In the latest blow, haemophiliacs could have been further put at risk by blood being collected from the prison population.
One Christchurch study put the prevalence of hepatitis C in inmates at 23 per cent, compared with up to 1 per cent in the general population.
The potentially fatal virus, which attacks the liver, is transmitted through blood-to-blood contact, most commonly through drug-users sharing needles.
It can also be spread through blood transfusions.
A Senate inquiry into Australia's bad blood scandal heard in February that the Australian Red Cross collected blood from prisoners a decade after Canada had stopped the practice.
In Victoria and Tasmania, mobile units were sent to prisons to collect inmates' blood until 1983.
The Red Cross said collections from New South Wales prisons ceased in the mid-1970s and in South Australia in 1975. Western Australia stopped in the early 1980s.
Carnahan wrote to the Health Ministry last month seeking assurances that inmates' blood was not collected in New Zealand.
He is still awaiting a reply.
But the Weekend Press put a list of questions to the ministry this week and its response confirmed the foundation's worst fears.
Deborah Woodley, manager of health services policy, said blood was collected from inmate volunteers "from time to time".
She understood blood was volunteered in some North Island prisons up to the early 1980s. It was not a widespread practice, she said.
"The practice stopped in line with international developments in safety standards and blood transfusion," Woodley said.
But Dr Graeme Woodfield, former medical director of the Auckland regional blood services, which collected over a third of New Zealand's blood, remembers the situation differently.
He said it was a widespread practice to take blood from prisoners, certainly in Auckland, as it was throughout the western world.
"It was a few years before it really dawned on us that this was not a good population to bleed off.
"Although hepatitis C started in 1972 it was a few years before we realised this was a major problem with prisoners."
Inmates were willing to donate blood, for altruistic reasons and because it was a break from a mundane routine.
At the time there were high rates of hepatitis B in prisons, which blood was screened for.
Hepatitis C was recognised as a separate disease in the 1970s and formally identified in late 1988. Woodfield remembers the complaints from Mount Eden Prison inmates when the mobile blood units stopped calling.
"I remember writing apologetic letters to them, saying `sorry, but we can't do it any more'," he said.
Woodfield said he sympathised with the haemophiliac community which was affected by the Government's tardiness in introducing hepatitis C screening.
"I think it's an indictment of the people in the Health Department that they haven't dealt with this.
"It's shameful that New Zealand should treat a group of patients like this in such a way. It's appalling."
Carnahan said he was not surprised that blood was collected from prisons, in line with world trends.
But he was disappointed that his group was not warned of the risks and learned of the practice via the media.
"New Zealand seems to have maintained a practice that was deemed unsafe by other countries," he said.
"As a first world country, it should have been learning from contemporary international experience and appears negligent to have continued this practice into the 1980s.
"At this point we do not know the precise date when this practice ceased, and the reasons for stopping it, but the practice seems to have continued after international knowledge of HIV and hepatitis C came to light."
Carnahan wants the police to review its inquiries into the culpability of former health ministers.
Police announced in August last year that a criminal prosecution would not proceed.
Any public inquiry should cover how much blood was collected from prisons and how it was used, he said.
"God only knows where it has gone. Was it processed or was it used as whole blood? Or was it just used for laboratory purposes?
"What other practices were also routine in this era?" asked Carnahan.
He has passed on the latest information to Wellington lawyer Roger Chapman, who is acting for 136 claimants suing the Government for failing to introduce national screening earlier.
Sixty of them are haemophiliacs.
Dr Cheryl Brunton, from the Christchurch School of Medicine and Health Sciences, studied hepatitis C in inmates after an outbreak at Paparua Prison in late 1991.
Of 273 prisoners surveyed, a surprising 23 per cent tested positive for hepatitis C antibodies, showing they had been exposed to the virus.
Thirteen per cent had a history of blood transfusion, 10 per cent had worked in
the health care industry with exposure to human blood, 40 per cent had had a
sexually transmitted disease, 79 per cent had tattoos and 74 per cent pierced
ears.