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| Afrikan Reflections Brothers And Sisters Must Drop The "Willie Lynch" Mentality And Combat white supremacy where ever it raises its head. |
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09-14-2009
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 The Obama, Swine flu connection: Who would of thought.... Quick note: Clinton was Govenor of Arkansas http://factor8movie.com/factor8.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_..._Blood_Scandal Bayer AG. Aids tainted blood; Nuremberg trials for War crimes (Jewish Holocaust), now tainted flu vaccine. On the eve of World War II the German chemical complex of I.G. Farben was the largest chemical manufacturing enterprise in the world, with extraordinary political and economic power and influence within the Hitlerian Nazi state. I. G. has been aptly described as "a state within a state." The Farben cartel dated from 1925, when organizing genius Hermann Schmitz (with Wall Street financial assistance) created the super-giant chemical enterprise out of six already giant German chemical companies — Badische Anilin, Bayer, Agfa, Hoechst, Weiler-ter-Meer, and Griesheim-Elektron. These companies were merged to become Inter-nationale Gesellschaft Farbenindustrie A.G. — or I.G. Farben for short. The GW Bush Gang - IG Farben 2001 (Note - For those new to this site, read the Welcome message at the top of Rense.com) By Robert Lederman1-6-01 "What my cabinet shows is that I am not afraid to surround myself with strong and competent people...a good executive is one that understands how to recruit people and how to delegate authority and responsibility."-GW Bush 1/2/2001 As promised GW Bush has recruited competent and experienced advisors. Despite their seeming diversity however they have a common denominator. The America they reflect is the oil, pharmaceutical, armament, Wall Street and eugenics interests long associated with the Bush family. Seventy years ago a similar configuration of oil, pharmaceutical, chemical, military supply and eugenics interests were organized by Wall Street into IG Farben/Standard Oil-Hitler's industrial powerhouse. To grasp the real significance of what GW Bush's cabinet has been brought together to accomplish it is essential to understand the history of IG Farben, its relationship with American corporations and how together they applied modern technology to the task of eugenics or scientific racism. According to former US Justice Dept. Nazi War Crimes prosecutor John Loftus-who is today the director of the Florida Holocaust Museum-"The Bush family fortune came from the Third Reich,"-Sarasota Herald-Tribune 11/11/2000 http://www.newscoast.com/headlinesstory2.cfm?ID=35115 Along with the Rockefellers (Standard Oil, Chase Manhattan Bank), Mellons (Gulf Oil, Alcoa Aluminum), DuPonts (DuPont Chemicals), General Motors and Henry Ford, banks and shipping companies operated by the Bush family were crucial players in setting up the industrial power behind the Third Reich. These companies poured hundreds of millions of dollars into IG Farben and provided it with technology for tactically-essential synthetic materials-while withholding the same materials and patents from the US government. The Rockefeller family, long aligned with the Bushes, owned Standard Oil. Through a stock transfer they became half owners of Germany's IG Farben with Farben likewise owning almost half of Standard Oil. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, IG Farben built and operated more than 40 concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, including Auschwitz. At their slave labor/factory/death camps chemicals, weapons, drugs, synthetic fuels and other materials vital to the Nazi war effort were manufactured. In addition, eugenicists like Dr. Josef Mengele used the human subjects in the camps for experiments the data from which are today the basis for many drugs marketed by the pharmaceutical industry-not too surprising in light of the fact that more Americans die from prescription drugs than from any other single cause. The GW Bush Gang - IG Farben 2001 Twenty years later the same Hermann Schmitz was put on trial at Nuremburg for war crimes committed by the I. G. cartel. Other I. G. Farben directors were placed on trial but the American affiliates of I. G. Farben and the American directors of I. G. itself were quietly forgotten; the truth was buried in the archives. I.G. was broken apart into four big German corporations: Bayer A.G., Agfa, BASF, and Hoechst CHAPTER TWO: The Empire of I.G. Farben I.G. Farben in America: The Technologies of General Aniline and Film  By MIKE McINTIRE and CHRISTOPHER DREW Published: March 7, 2007 The New York Times > Log In- hrfSnYdLzkPG/d8b725hg Less than two months after ascending to the United States Senate, Barack Obama bought more than $50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose major investors included some of his biggest political donors. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image  Robert Sullivan/AFP-Getty ImagesBarack Obama answering questions last weekend outside a church in Selma, Ala. Blog The Caucus  Kate Phillips and The Times's politics staff report on the latest political news from around the nation. Join the discussion.One of the companies was a biotech concern that was starting to develop a drug to treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying about $5,000 of its shares, Mr. Obama took the lead in a legislative push for more federal spending to battle the disease. The most recent financial disclosure form for Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, also shows that he bought more than $50,000 in stock in a satellite communications business whose principal backers include four friends and donors who had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees. A spokesman for Mr. Obama, who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, said yesterday that the senator did not know that he had invested in either company until fall 2005, when he learned of it and decided to sell the stocks. He sold them at a net loss of $13,000. The spokesman, Bill Burton, said Mr. Obama’s broker bought the stocks without consulting the senator, under the terms of a blind trust that was being set up for the senator at that time but was not finalized until several months after the investments were made. “He went about this process to avoid an actual or apparent conflict of interest, and he had no knowledge of the stocks he owned,” Mr. Burton said. “And when he realized that he didn’t have the level of blindness that he expected, he moved to terminate the trust.” Mr. Obama has made ethics a signature issue, and his quest for the presidency has benefited from the perception that he is unlike politicians who blend public and private interests. There is no evidence that any of his actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight months that he owned the stocks. Even so, the stock purchases raise questions about how he could unwittingly come to invest in two relatively obscure companies, whose backers happen to include generous contributors to his political committees. Among those donors was Jared Abbruzzese, a New York businessman now at the center of an F.B.I. inquiry into public corruption in Albany, who had also contributed to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that sought to undermine John Kerry’s Democratic presidential campaign in 2004. Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed about the stock deals, has already had to contend with a controversy that arose out of his reliance on a major campaign contributor in Chicago to help him in a personal financial transaction. In that earlier case, he acknowledged last year that it had been a mistake to involve the contributor, a developer who has since been indicted in an unrelated political scandal, in deals related to the Obamas’ purchase of a home. Senate ethics rules do not prohibit lawmakers from owning stocks — even in companies that do business with the federal government or could benefit from legislation they advance — and indeed other members of Congress have investments in government contractors. The rules say only that lawmakers should not take legislative actions whose primary purpose is to benefit themselves. Mr. Obama’s sale of his shares in the two companies ended what appears to have been a brief foray into highly speculative investing that stood out amid an otherwise conservative portfolio of mutual funds and cash accounts, a review of his Senate disclosure statements shows. He earned $2,000 on the biotech company, AVI BioPharma, and lost $15,000 on the satellite communications concern, Skyterra, according to Mr. Burton of the Obama campaign. Mr. Burton said the trust was different from qualified blind trusts that other senators commonly used, because it was intended to allow him greater flexibility to address any accusations of conflicts that might arise from its assets. He said Mr. Obama had decided to sell the stocks after receiving a communication that made him concerned about how the trust was set up. The investments came at a time when Mr. Obama was enjoying sudden financial success, following his victory at the polls in November 2004. He had signed a $1.9 million book deal, and his ethics disclosure reports show that he received $1.2 million of book money in 2005. His wife, Michelle, a hospital vice president in Chicago, received a promotion that March, nearly tripling her salary to $317,000, and they bought a $1.6 million house in June. The house sat on a large property that was subdivided to make it more affordable, and one of Mr. Obama’s political donors bought the adjacent lot. The disclosure forms show that the Obamas also placed several hundred thousand dollars in a new private-client account at JPMorgan Chase, a bond fund and a checking account at a Chicago bank. But he put $50,000 to $100,000 into an account at UBS, which his aides say was recommended to him by a wealthy friend, George W. Haywood, who was also a major investor in both Skyterra and AVI BioPharma, public securities filings show Mr. Haywood and his wife, Cheryl, have contributed close to $50,000 to Mr. Obama’s campaigns and to his political action committee, the Hopefund. Mr. Haywood declined to comment. Within two weeks of his purchase of the biotech stock that Feb. 22, Mr. Obama initiated what he has called “one of my top priorities since arriving in the Senate,” a push to increase federal financing to fight avian flu. Several dozen people had already died from the disease in Southeast Asia, and experts were warning that a worldwide pandemic could kill tens of millions of people. Mr. Obama was one of the first political leaders to call for more money to head off the danger, which he described as an urgent public health threat. His first step came on March 4, 2005, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved his request for $25 million to help contain the disease in Asia; the full Senate later approved that measure. And in April 2005, he introduced a bill calling for more research on avian flu drugs and urging the government to increase its stockpiles of antiviral medicines. Mr. Obama repeated this call in a letter that Aug. 9 to Michael O. Levitt, the health and human services secretary. And in September 2005, Mr. Obama and Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, succeeded in amending another bill to provide $3.8 billion for battling the flu. Meanwhile, the drug company in which he invested, AVI BioPharma, had been working to develop its own medicine to treat avian flu victims. In a conference call with Wall Street analysts on March 8, 2005, the company’s chairman, Denis R. Burger, said the firm was “aggressively going forward” with its avian flu research and hoped to work with federal agencies on it. The company, which is also developing medicines in a number of other areas, provided several updates on its avian flu research in 2005, including one on Oct. 21 saying the company was likely to develop a treatment for avian flu “in a relatively short time.” Mr. Obama sold what appears to have been about 2,000 shares of the company’s stock a week later, when it traded at about $3.50 a share, or about $1 a share more than when he bought it. Company officials said they never talked to the senator about his work on avian flu. And while the company has received millions of dollars in federal money to develop drugs for treating ebola and other serious diseases, it still has not received any federal money for its avian flu research. The company’s stock briefly surged to nearly $9 a share in January 2006 when it announced promising research findings on the flu drug. But the company still has not applied for federal approvals to test and market the drug. Unlike his investment in AVI, which yielded a small profit, Mr. Obama’s stake in Skyterra Communications went in the opposite direction, despite a promising start. He bought his Skyterra shares the same day the Federal Communications Commission ruled in favor of the company’s effort to create a nationwide wireless network by combining satellites and land-based communications systems. Immediately after that morning ruling, Tejas Securities, a regional brokerage in Texas that handled investment banking for Skyterra, issued a research report speculating that Skyterra stock could triple in value. Tejas and people associated with it were major donors to Mr. Obama’s political committees, having raised more than $150,000 since 2004. The company’s chairman, John J. Gorman, has held fund-raisers for the senator in Austin, Tex., and arranged for him to use a private plane for several political events in 2005. Mr. Gorman declined to comment. In May 2005, Mr. Abbruzzese, who was vice chairman of Tejas and a principal investor in Skyterra, contributed $10,000 along with his wife to Mr. Obama’s political action committee — a departure from his almost exclusive support of Republicans. Eight months earlier, for instance, he had contributed $5,000 to the Swift Boat group, and he has given $100,000 to the Republican National Committee since 2004. Last year, Mr. Abbruzzese, a major investor in several high-tech companies in New York and elsewhere, emerged as a central figure in the federal investigation of the New York State Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno. The inquiry is examining Mr. Bruno’s personal business dealings, including whether he accepted money from Mr. Abbruzzese in return for Senate approval of grants for one of Mr. Abbruzzese’s companies. Both men have denied any wrongdoing. Mr. Abbruzzese did not return phone calls seeking comment. Skyterra’s share price was lifted into the $40 range for a time on the strength of the F.C.C. ruling, but eventually drifted down into the low 30s, and was at $31 when Mr. Obama sold his shares for a $15,000 loss on Nov. 1, 2005. A few months later, it plunged into the $20 range, and today trades below $10 a share. A spokesman for Skyterra said the company’s top officials had not been aware of Mr. Obama’s investment. Baxter working on vaccine to stop swine flu, though admitted sending live pandemic flu viruses to subcontractor By Lori Price, www.legitgov.org 26 Apr 2009 The OMFG moment of the century: Illinois-based Baxter working on vaccine to 'stop' swine flu outbreak in Mexico 25 Apr 2009 Specialty drug maker Baxter International Inc. will work with the World Health Organization to develop a vaccine that could stem [foment] an outbreak of a deadly swine flu strain in Mexico. Baxter spokesman Christopher Bona said Saturday that the Deerfield, Ill.-based company has asked the WHO for a sample of the flu strain. He says Baxter has patented technology that allows the company to develop vaccines in half the time it usually takes -- about 13 weeks instead of 26. [Is Baxter International taking a page from the Blackwater playbook? Just as Blackwater/Xe keep on killing to justify their multi-billion dollar contracts to provide 'security' in Iraq and Afghanistan, Baxter International is poised to make *billions* to vaccinate people against their pandemic.] Are you ready? Wait for it... Virus mix-up by lab could have resulted in pandemic [Uh, it apparently f*cking *did.*] 06 Mar 2009 It's emerged that virulent H5N1 bird flu was sent out by accident from an Austrian lab [the Austrian branch of US vaccine company, Baxter] last year and given to ferrets in the Czech Republic before anyone realised. As well as the risk of it escaping into the wild, the H5N1 got mixed with a human strain, which might have spawned a hybrid that could unleash a pandemic.Baxter awaits frozen vials of virus strain from Atlanta --Following the 2001 terrorist attacks, Baxter would not disclose where it was making a stockpile of small pox vaccine ordered by the U.S. government. 06 May 2009 Noel Barrett and his team of researchers at Baxter International Inc. labs in Vienna have been through this before. Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, they were part of a multi-company effort to produce more than 150 million dosages of small pox vaccine. More recently, Deerfield, Ill.-based Baxter developed millions of dosages of a bird flu vaccine, which have been stockpiled in the past four years... Coming up with a vaccine will begin for Baxter after the strain arrives at its Vienna research and development labs, where Barrett's team awaits the frozen vials. The virus is expected to come via flight from Atlanta, where epidemiologists from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been tracking the spread of the virus. Spectre of pandemic 26 Apr 2009 The new strain contains gene sequences from North American and Eurasian swine flus, North American bird flu and North American human flu, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of Mexico's dead were young, healthy adults, and none was aged older than 60 or or younger than three, the World Health Organisation said. This has alarmed health officials... Pandemic flus - like the 1918 Spanish flu and the 1957 and 1968 pandemics - often strike young, healthy people the hardest. Mexican officials promised a huge immunisation campaign in the capital this week. [The deadly vaccine program *ensures* a pandemic!] CLG: Flu Kills The Torture Memos --In a 'Holy convenience, Batman!' moment, a 'unique' flu virus (one likely concocted in US Army labs) overtakes media coverage of revelations that the highest levels of the US government instructed the CIA (and private contractors) to torture terror suspects. By Lori Price 26 April 2009 Guess where the first swine flu outbreak occurred? That's right, Fort Dix, New Jersey, in 1976. Thirteen soldiers died, leading the US government to force a questionable vaccine on the population -- backed by a legal liability escape clause mandated by and for the pharma-terrorists. Next, people started dying not from the flu -- but from the *vaccine.* [See compendium of key flu articles here.] Sanofi Aventis Invests 100 Million Euros In New Facility In Mexico to Produce Seasonal and Pandemic Influenza Vaccine 19 Mar 2009 Sanofi-aventis, announced the signing of an agreement with the Mexican authorities to build a 100 million euro facility to manufacture influenza vaccine in Mexico. The announcement was made during a ceremony attended by Felipe Calderon, [unelected] President of Mexico, and Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, who was in Mexico City for a State visit. "By building this new facility, sanofi-aventis is proud to contribute to the strengthening of Mexico's health infrastructure and is eager to support Mexico's exemplary commitment to public health through influenza immunization and pandemic readiness", said Chris Viehbacher, Chief Executive Officer of sanofiaventis. [Now, that's what I call foresight!] DoD to 'augment civilian law' during pandemic or bioterror attack CLG Pandemic Action Alerts -- Petition against mandatory vaccines; contact the White House, US Congress--More flu news here May 22, 2003 2 Paths of Bayer Drug in 80's: Riskier One Steered Overseas 2 Paths of Bayer Drug in 80's: Riskier One Steered Overseas - The New York Times By WALT BOGDANICH and ERIC KOLI A division of the pharmaceutical company Bayer sold millions of dollars of blood-clotting medicine for hemophiliacs -- medicine that carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS -- to Asia and Latin America in the mid-1980's while selling a new, safer product in the West, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. The Bayer unit, Cutter Biological, introduced its safer medicine in late February 1984 as evidence mounted that the earlier version was infecting hemophiliacs with H.I.V. Yet for over a year, the company continued to sell the old medicine overseas, prompting a United States regulator to accuse Cutter of breaking its promise to stop selling the product. By continuing to sell the old version of the life-saving medicine, the records show, Cutter officials were trying to avoid being stuck with large stores of a product that was proving increasingly unmarketable in the United States and Europe. Yet even after it began selling the new product, the company kept making the old medicine for several months more. A telex from Cutter to a distributor suggests one reason behind that decision, too: the company had several fixed-price contracts and believed that the old product would be cheaper to produce. Nearly two decades later, the precise human toll of these marketing decisions is difficult, if not impossible, to document. Many patient records are now unavailable, and because an AIDS test was not developed until later in the epidemic, it is difficult to pinpoint when foreign hemophiliacs were infected with H.I.V. -- before Cutter began selling its safer medicine or afterward. But in Hong Kong and Taiwan alone, more than 100 hemophiliacs got H.I.V. after using Cutter's old medicine, according to records and interviews. Many have since died. Cutter also continued to sell the older product after February 1984 in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan and Argentina, records show. The Cutter documents, which were produced in connection with lawsuits filed by American hemophiliacs, went largely unnoticed until The Times began asking about them. ''These are the most incriminating internal pharmaceutical industry documents I have ever seen,'' said Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe, who as director of the Public Citizen Health Research Group has been investigating the industry's practices for three decades. Bayer officials, responding on behalf of Cutter and its president at the time, Jack Ryan, declined to be interviewed but did answer written questions. In a statement, Bayer said that Cutter had ''behaved responsibly, ethically and humanely'' in selling the old product overseas. Cutter had continued to sell the old medicine, the statement said, because some customers doubted the new drug's effectiveness, and because some countries were slow to approve its sale. The company also said that a shortage of plasma, used to make the medicine, had kept Cutter from manufacturing more of the new product. ''Decisions made nearly two decades ago were based on the best scientific information of the time and were consistent with the regulations in place,'' the statement said. The medicine, called Factor VIII concentrate, essentially provides the missing ingredient without which hemophiliacs' blood cannot clot. By injecting themselves with it, hemophiliacs can stop bleeding or prevent bleeds from starting; some use it as many as three times a week. It has helped hemophiliacs lead normal lives. But in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, it became a killer. The medicine was made using pools of plasma from 10,000 or more donors, and since there was still no screening test for the AIDS virus, it carried a high risk of passing along the disease; even a tiny number of H.I.V.-positive donors could contaminate an entire pool. In the United States, AIDS was passed on to thousands of hemophiliacs, many of whom died, in one of the worst drug-related medical disasters in history. While admitting no wrongdoing, Bayer and three other companies that made the concentrate have paid hemophiliacs about $600 million to settle more than 15 years of lawsuits accusing them of making a dangerous product. The Cutter documents -- a few of them have surfaced in recent years in television and newspaper reports about Cutter's marketing practices -- were gleaned from that litigation. But because the documents did not relate directly to the suits, most went uninvestigated. The documents -- internal memorandums, minutes of company marketing meetings and telexes to foreign distributors -- reveal and chronicle Cutter's decision to keep exporting the older product after it began making the new one, which was heat-treated to kill H.I.V. The heat treatment rendered the virus ''undetectable'' in the product, according to a government study. (There are few available records documenting the actions and decisions of the three other American-based companies that also sold unheated concentrate after offering a heated product.) Doctors and patients contacted overseas said they had not known of the contents of the Cutter documents. Bayer and other blood-product companies, though admitting no wrongdoing, have already made some payments to foreign hemophiliacs. It is unclear if Bayer could now face legal liability specifically for selling the older product after a safer one was available. Federal regulators helped keep the overseas sales out of the public eye, the documents indicate. In May of 1985, believing that the companies had broken a voluntary agreement to withdraw the old medicine from the market, the Food and Drug Administration's regulator of blood products, Dr. Harry M. Meyer Jr., summoned officials of the companies to a meeting and ordered them to comply. ''It was unacceptable for them to ship that material overseas,'' he said later in legal papers. Even so, Dr. Meyer asked that the issue be ''quietly solved without alerting the Congress, the medical community and the public,'' according to Cutter's account of the 1985 meeting. Dr. Meyer said later that he could not recall making that statement, but another blood-product company's summary of the meeting also noted that the F.D.A. wanted the matter settled ''quickly and quietly.'' Dr. Meyer died in 2001. Whether Cutter was behaving ethically became an issue in internal company discussions. ''Can we in good faith continue to ship nonheat-treated coagulation products to Japan?'' a company task force asked in February 1985, fearing that some of its plasma donors might be H.I.V. positive. The decision, records show, was yes. Taken together, the documents provide an inside view of Cutter's bottom-line strategizing and efforts to manage the flow of information amid growing public anxiety about the safety of its product. When a Hong Kong distributor in late 1984 expressed an interest in the new product, the records show, Cutter asked the distributor to ''use up stocks'' of the old medicine before switching to its ''safer, better'' product. Several months later, as hemophiliacs in Hong Kong began testing positive for H.I.V., some local doctors questioned whether Cutter was dumping ''AIDS tainted'' medicine into less-developed countries. Still, Cutter assured the distributor that the unheated product posed ''no severe hazard'' and was the ''same fine product we have supplied for years.'' Li Wei-chun said her son, who died in 1996 at the age of 23, was one of the hemophiliacs in Hong Kong who got AIDS after using that product. ''They did not care about the lives in Asia,'' Ms. Li said in a recent interview. ''It was racial discrimination.'' How It Started Discovery That Blood Spreads the Disease At the beginning of the epidemic, more than two decades ago, fear over what would later be known as AIDS was centered mostly among gays and intravenous drug users. But that changed on July 16, 1982, when the federal Centers for Disease Control reported that three hemophiliacs had acquired the disease. This gave epidemiologists a strong reason to believe that the disease was being spread through blood products. And that belief carried grave implications for the many thousands of hemophiliacs who routinely injected themselves with concentrate made from giant pools of donated plasma. Because an AIDS test had not yet been developed, federal health officials had no idea how many plasma donors carried the disease. By March of 1983, the C.D.C. went so far as to warn that blood products ''appear responsible for AIDS among hemophilia patients.'' The unfolding story had not gone unnoticed at Cutter headquarters. Back in January, Cutter's manager of plasma procurement had acknowledged in a letter: ''There is strong evidence to suggest that AIDS is passed on to other people through . . . plasma products.'' With sales of concentrate beginning to slip, Cutter got more bad news in May 1983: after learning that a Cutter rival had begun to make heated concentrate, France decided to halt all imports of clotting concentrate until it could figure out what to do. Fearing a loss of customers, Cutter conceived a marketing plan that stopped well short of full disclosure. ''We want to give the impression that we are continuously improving our product without telling them we expect soon to also have a heat-treated'' concentrate, an internal memo said. Several weeks later, Cutter tried to minimize the danger hemophiliacs faced when using blood products. ''AIDS has become the center of irrational response in many countries,'' the company said in a June 1983 letter to distributors in France and 20 other countries. ''This is of particular concern to us because of unsubstantiated speculations that this syndrome may be transmitted by certain blood products.'' The French decided to keep using unheated concentrate, and Cutter said it sold them more of the unheated product in August 1983. Later, two French health officials were sent to prison for continuing to use up old stocks of unheated concentrate in 1985, when a heated product was available. Cutter finally received United States approval to sell heated concentrate on Feb. 29, 1984, the last of the four major blood product companies to do so. Though some doctors and patients held out against the heated product, a safer era had clearly begun for hemophiliacs in the United States. Market Considerations Bayer Says Some Wanted Old Product For five months more, until August 1984, Cutter said it continued to make the old, unheated medicine. The records suggest that the company hoped to preserve the profit margin from ''several large fixed-price contracts.'' But in its statements to The Times, Bayer also said that some customers still wanted the old medicine, initially believing -- incorrectly, it turned out -- that heating the concentrate could leave it less effective and possibly dangerous. The new product, meanwhile, was selling briskly, leaving Cutter with a problem: ''There is excess nonheated inventory,'' the company noted in minutes of a meeting on Nov. 15, 1984. ''They needed to get the return for what they invested,'' explained Michael Baum, a Los Angeles lawyer who has represented dozens of United States hemophiliacs in suits against blood-product companies. ''They paid the donors. They had processed the plasma, put it into vials, kept it in warehouses -- and all that expense had already been incurred.'' (One vial is roughly equivalent to a small dose, though more may be needed to stop severe bleeding.) At the November meeting, the minutes show, Cutter said it planned to ''review international markets again to determine if more of this product can be sold.'' And in the months that followed, it had some success, exporting more than 5 million units (a typical vial might contain 250 units) in the first three months of 1985, documents show. ''Argentina has been sold 300,000 units and will possibly order more, and the Far East has ordered 400,000 units,'' according to a March 1985 Cutter report. Two months later, the company reported that ''in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, doctors are primarily dispensing nonheated Cutter'' concentrate. By then, while there were still a small number of buyers in the United States, nearly all of the unheated concentrate was being sold abroad, available records show. All told, Cutter appears to have exported more than 100,000 vials of unheated concentrate, worth more than $4 million, after it began selling its safer product. Gary Mull, an international product manager for Cutter at the time, said no one at the company had ordered him to sell the unheated concentrate as a way of avoiding a write-off. ''If I had reason to personally believe, let alone the company'' that any of the material was highly infectious, ''we wouldn't have sent it out,'' he said. Mr. Mull, who now works for another blood-product company, added, ''I wasn't the shipping person, but I would still be the person in charge of queueing it up.'' Bayer, which is based in Germany, said in its statement that an overall plasma shortage in 1985 had kept Cutter from making more heated medicine. But Cutter may actually have contributed to that shortage -- by using some its limited plasma supplies to continue making the old product. Bayer's response also emphasized that some countries were slow to approve its new product. For example, Bayer said ''procedural requirements'' imposed by Taiwan had delayed its ''ability to apply for registration'' and had led to other delays as well. But an official at Taiwan's health department, Hsu Chien-wen, said recently that Cutter had not applied for permission to sell the new, safer medicine until July 1985, about a year and a half after it began doing so in the United States. In one case, records show, Cutter officials even discussed trying to delay Japan's approval of heated concentrate so the company could shed stocks of the older product. Bayer said Cutter did not act on that idea. Officials from the three other American-based companies that continued to sell unheated concentrate -- Armour Pharmaceutical, Baxter International and Alpha Therapeutic -- either declined to be interviewed or denied wrongdoing, in some cases citing the same reasons Bayer did for its decisions. Still, what is not in dispute is that by the spring of 1985, few researchers doubted the connection between AIDS and unheated concentrate. The previous October, the federal Centers for Disease Control, using a prototype H.I.V. test, had reported that 74 percent of hemophiliacs who used unheated concentrate had tested positive for H.I.V. In the same report, the agency said a study done with Cutter had shown that heat treatment rendered the virus ''undetectable.'' (Bayer said no one knew ''definitively'' that its heat treatment killed the AIDS virus until eight months later.) By May 1985, as the AIDS scare reached hemophiliacs in Hong Kong, Cutter's distributor there placed an urgent call to Cutter headquarters, records show. Sounding distraught, he told of an impending medical emergency. Hemophiliacs were frightened. Children were being infected with H.I.V. Parents were hysterical. Couldn't the company send the new, safer product? Cutter replied that most of the new medicine was going to the United States and Europe, and that there was not enough left for Hong Kong, though a small amount was available for the ''most vocal patients.'' Dr. Chan Tai-kwong, who treated hemophiliacs at Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong, said doctors asked Cutter's distributor for the heated concentrate but could not get it; 40 percent of his patients were H.I.V.- positive, Dr. Chan said. Dr. Patrick Yuen, who worked at another hospital, gave a similar account. ''The local distributor asked us to keep using it,'' he said. ''They said not to be afraid.'' Even so, Cutter knew the market for the older medicine had all but dried up. ''It appears there are no longer any markets in the Far East where we can expect to sell substantial quantities of nonheat-treated,'' a Cutter official wrote in May 1985. Bayer said Cutter stopped shipping unheated concentrate in July 1985. Later, in the early 1990's, two members of a Hong Kong government commission that concluded the tragedy could not have been avoided, expressed concern when told of the internal Cutter documents. Dr. Yuen, a member of the panel, said Cutter failed to warn doctors and hemophiliacs in Hong Kong about the dangers of unheated concentrate. ''It should tell the whole world, not just Europe and America,'' he said. Bayer also said Cutter did fully inform foreign customers about the heated product. And Bayer said it took more than a year to get Hong Kong's approval to sell it. But Dr. Cindy Lai, assistant director of Hong Kong's health department, said that in the 1980's Cutter needed only to get an import license. ''It normally took one week,'' she said. The delay harmed more than just the hemophiliacs, said Mrs. Li, the mother of the young hemophiliac who died of AIDS in 1993. Infected with a terrible and still mysterious disease, hemophiliacs were often shunned by family, friends and employers. ''It was the immoral drug company that caused some families to fall apart,'' she said. ''They blamed and tortured each other. It was better to die than to live.'' The Message Gap Many Slow to Hear Of the Problems Today, in the Internet age, vast amounts of the most up-to-the-minute medical information are available at the click of a mouse. News moved less efficiently in 1985. In Taiwan, Dr. Shen Ming-ching, who ran the country's largest clinic for hemophiliacs, recalled in a recent interview that it was not until he traveled to the United States for a conference in July 1985 that he learned for certain that heat treatment killed H.I.V. Upon returning home, he said, he immediately insisted that Taiwan authorities stop importing the old concentrate. For his efforts on behalf of the hemophiliacs in Taiwan, Dr. Shen said, the government gave him a certificate and ''a beautiful medal.'' As for the hemophiliacs themselves, 44 of Dr. Shen's patients got AIDS, including a 2-year-old. He said 23 had died. None of the Taiwan patients interviewed by The Times said they knew that Cutter had begun selling the safer medicine in the United States in early 1984. One Taiwan patient who received Cutter's old concentrate was Lee Ching-chang. Mr. Lee said he got his first concentrate in November 1983 at age 22, and continued receiving the unheated type into 1985. Mr. Lee said he tested positive for H.I.V. in 1986. ''I am bitterly angry,'' he said. Mr. Lee said he was too sick to work. Six other hemophiliacs with H.I.V. or their families spoke to The Times about despair, discrimination, job loss or in some cases thoughts of suicide. Mr. Lee was the only hemophiliac with H.I.V. willing to be photographed. Tang Fu-kuo helps AIDS patients in Taiwan. ''I cannot tell myself that it's just history; let's forget it,'' Mr. Tang said. ''Nobody wants to acknowledge fault.'' Selling Medicine In Spite of Danger According to internal company documents, Cutter, a division of Bayer that made a blood-clotting medicine called Factor VIII concentrate, continued to sell medicine overseas that carried a high risk of AIDS even after a safer product was available. JULY 1982 -- Centers for Disease Control reports three hemophiliacs ill with what later became known as AIDS and warns that the disease may be transmitted through blood products including concentrate. JANUARY 1983 -- A Cutter official warns in a letter that ''there is strong evidence to suggest that AIDS is passed on to other people through . . . plasma products.'' JUNE 1983 -- Cutter complains to overseas distributors about ''unsubstantiated speculations'' linking AIDS to concentrate. FEBRUARY 1984 -- Cutter gets license in the United States to sell new concentrate that has been heated to kill H.I.V. OCTOBER 1984 -- C.D.C. says a study with Cutter found that heat treatment kills the AIDS virus. Prototype H.I.V. test finds 74 percent of hemophiliacs who used unheated concentrate tested positive for H.I.V. NOVEMBER 1984 -- Cutter notes excess inventory of unheated product. ''Will review international markets'' to see if more unheated product can be sold. NOVEMBER 1984 -- The company tells its Hong Kong distributor ''we must use up stocks'' of unheated medicine before switching to ''safer, better'' heat-treated product. FEBRUARY 1985 -- A Cutter task force asks in a memo, ''Can we in good faith continue to ship nonheat-treated coagulation products to Japan?'' APRIL 1985 -- Cutter considers trying ''to influence a delay in introduction of heattreated product'' in Japan. The company later says it did not act on that suggestion. MAY 1985 -- Cutter tells its Hong Kong distributor that the unheated medicine poses no ''severe hazard.'' MAY 1985 -- Cutter says Hong Kong doctors question whether it is selling off ''excess stocks of old AIDS-tainted'' medicine. MAY 1985 -- The Food and Drug Administration realizes that companies are still selling unheated concentrate overseas. F.D.A. official wants problem ''quietly solved without alerting the Congress, the medical community and the public,'' according to Cutter documents. JULY 1985 -- Cutter says it started shipping only heated product. Tainted Exports More on Page C5: How It Started Market Considerations The Message Gap Photos: Dr. Shen Ming-ching, who ran Taiwan's largest clinic for hemophiliacs, shows the certificate and medal that the government gave him for his efforts.; Tang Fu-kuo, who helps AIDS victims in Taiwan, surrounded by patients who declined to have their faces shown. ''I cannot tell myself that it's just history; let's forget it,'' he said of events leading to the spread of AIDS. ''Nobody wants to acknowledge fault.'' Lee Ching-chang, son of a Taiwan farmer, tested positive for H.I.V. in 1986. (Photographs by Sam Yeh/Agence France-Presse, for The New York Times)(pg. C5) Bloody awful How money and politics contaminated Arkansas's prison plasma program http://www.arktimes.com/Articles/Art...b-8ba15f058fe1 Last April, at the Abbey Garden on Great College Street in London, a British widowvented her frustration over a now-defunct state program in Arkansas that may have killed her husband. She addressed Lord Archer of Sandwell, a former solicitor general, who is leading an independent inquiry into how 4,500 hemophilia patients in the UK were exposed to lethal viruses in blood products in the 1970s and '80s. Two thousand have since died of either Hepatitis C or HIV, in what has been called the worst disaster in the history of the nation's health service. The widow, 47-year-old Carol Grayson, spoke calmly of the death of her husband, Peter Longstaff, two years ago. She explained that he was one of the patients who were treated with Factor 8, a blood-clotting product manufactured from human plasma. Grayson and Longstaff had believed that his medicine was safe; that it had been derived from plasma collected in the U.K. from donors who were not paid. They learned too late that it had been manufactured, not from plasma collected in their own country, but from persons in other parts of the world and that some of those sellers were, in fact, Arkansas prison inmates. In the U.K., it is illegal to collect plasma from prisoners. That restriction arose in part from a philosophy that considered plasma from unpaid donors to be safer, and partly because collecting human tissue from prisoners — paid or not — was considered exploitative. When Grayson was called to testify, she recounted the shock she felt when she and Longstaff learned that plasma collected from groups, such as prisoners, who were considered in the U.K. to be high-risk, had been pooled, fractionated and dispensed as medicine to people like her husband. Shredded records She described his difficult death and the further difficulty that she and other activists have had in tracking down records from their own and other governments about how the catastrophe occurred. For instance, she said, they learned that many of the files in the U.K. dealing with the scandal were shredded during the 1990s. In 2000, the British Department of Health conducted an inquiry into the records' destruction, but never published its findings. This spring, as Lord Archer's inquiry was getting underway, the BBC requested the health department's report, but was told that the document was still being withheld at the request of the prime minister's office. Grayson and other members of the country's Haemophilia Society are pressing their government for full disclosure. They would also like to see records from this side of the plasma transaction, particularly records pertaining to the inmate plasma center run from 1964 to 1991 by the Arkansas Department of Correction. Grayson is particularly interested in the Arkansas center. With the help of Little Rock documentary filmmaker Kelly Duda, she said, she has tracked batches of the blood-clotting product her husband received to plasma that was drawn from inmates at Arkansas's Cummins Unit. Duda has become something of a celebrity among hemophiliac victims and their survivors since his film, “Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal,” was released in 2005. A review that year in the trade magazine Variety called the film “a sturdy, concise, no-nonsense documentary that ... would probably win Peabodys if shown on ‘Frontline,' HBO or any of the several other outlets with social agendas and nerve enough to air the appalling story...” Factor 8 was seen by relatively small audiences in Little Rock during two recent film festivals. It is receiving greater attention in countries affected by the tainted blood. The film focuses on how the Arkansas plasma program operated during the 1980s, years when Bill Clinton was governor — and when the emergence of the AIDS virus was making all trade in blood a deadly serious business. In her testimony to Lord Archer, Grayson suggested, “As Clinton now travels the world on AIDS prevention, surely he should be willing to assist with investigations into a past prison plasmapheresis program in his own backyard.” She added, “Perhaps the Inquiry could write to him officially and ask him to help us secure the relevant documentation relating to Cummins Unit Arkansas Prison.” ‘Why?' Dan Farthing, communications manager for Britain's Haemophilila Society, echoed Grayson's interest in seeking answers from Arkansas. “We know of three UK cases of HIV that can be directly traced back to Arkansas prison blood,” he wrote in an e-mailed response to questions. Farthing wrote that members of the society wonder why “high-risk groups like prisoners were not excluded from donating blood.” With reference to Arkansas, he wrote, “The state officials should not have approved such practices, and our government certainly should not have licenced the import of products made from prison blood.” Since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had banned prison blood from being sold in the U.S. as early as 1984, Farthing said he wondered, “why blood and blood products not thought fit for U.S. consumption was allowed to be exported rather than destroyed.” In his film, Duda chronicled his mostly fruitless attempts to obtain documents on the plasma program from Arkansas prison officials and officials of the two companies that contracted with the ADC to run the program during the 1980s. This reporter is shown in one part of the film explaining that records from Clinton's terms as governor were also unavailable, since Clinton took possession of them when he left office to run for president. Today, Clinton's governor's papers — some 2,000 boxes of them — are stored on the upper two floors of the Central Arkansas Library System's Main Library, a few blocks west of the Clinton Presidential Center. While the presidential papers have been made public, records of Clinton's years as governor have not; nor does Clinton mention prisons in his autobiography. The library system's director, Bobby Roberts, says the governor's papers eventually will be moved to the Arkansas Studies Institute, now under construction near the main library. But, Roberts added, the papers will only be released to the institute in batches by topic, with Clinton's approval. ‘A lot of politics' Besides his current role as the archivist of Clinton's papers, Roberts, a former member of Governor Clinton's staff, also served on the Arkansas Board of Correction during some of the most controversial years of the state-run plasma program. Clinton appointed him to the board in 1986. It was an era when almost everything about the prisons was contentious, if not dangerous. Problems with the prisons' plasma program were almost totally eclipsed by other serious problems — including suspected murders, rapes, bribery, embezzlement, and substandard medical care. Clinton and his aides were also battling to end an entrenched system of bonuses for high-ranking prison employees. There were schemes and practices in the prisons that many in the state would prefer to forget. Even the ADC's own website, which chronicles the prison system's history from 1838 to the present, omits the entire the span of years covered by this article. But Roberts was willing to discuss them, perhaps because he opposed so much of what transpired during the administration of ADC Director A.L. “Art” Lockhart. Roberts went even further than discussing the prisons, the plasma program, and some of the politics that shaped them. He also volunteered that he had placed his own records from his years on the prison board in the library's Butler Center for Arkansas Studies and that they were available for examination. The papers tell an ugly story of a prison system that was often described in newspapers at the time as a fiefdom controlled by three men: state Sen. Knox Nelson of Pine Bluff, state Rep. William F. “Bill” Foster of England and ADC Director Lockhart. There were allegations — some proven — that some in “the cartel,” as it was also called, used the prisons to enrich themselves, along with a cadre of local businessmen. Roberts recalled it as a time when Nelson held the upper hand over Clinton with regard to the prison system, which was headquartered in his district. Roberts said Nelson made it clear to Clinton that, as chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, he would prevent legislation the governor wanted in other areas, such as schools, roads, and economic development, from ever reaching a vote if Clinton pressed for changes in the prisons. “Knox and I got into it about everything under the sun,” Roberts said. “I don't think any governor was going to cross him — and a handful of other senators down there — and think he was going to get anything done. “There was a lot of politics that went on in those things. You could not do anything with the ADC if you ran afoul of Bill Foster and Knox Nelson. That's just the reality of it.” Even so, Roberts bridles at the suggestion, made in Duda's film and elsewhere, that responsibility for the problem-riddled plasma program rests with the former governor. He admits that “the management down there was flawed,” that “some inmates were using their position to gain leverage,” and that, “certainly, that bunch that was running it was inept at best.” But, he insists, “Those mistakes rest with me and the board, not the governor. I think that's what irritates me.” Roberts said he was a member of the minority on the board that tried to tackle Lockhart, Nelson, Foster, and many of their prison programs. Because there were so many concerns, he says, “We weren't focused on plasma.” ‘A hateful way' Arkansas is one of the few states that does not pay inmates even minimal amounts for work. Yet most correction experts agree that inmates need money. For years, the justification offered for running a plasma program at all was that it offered inmates a way to make money that was acceptable to the citizens of Arkansas. Roberts was acutely aware, as he put it, that people in prison “need a source of money.” Some tried to send a bit home to relatives. Others used it to purchase small commissary items such as paper and stamps. “Some of them,” he said, “would only get two apples for Christmas. It was an unfortunate set of circumstances.” At the same time, Roberts understood public resistance here to allowing inmates to earn even minimal funds. “If we tried to do that in the General Assembly,” he said, “we wouldn't have gotten five votes for it. The only way for inmates in this state to get money — and it's a hateful way — was to sell plasma.” Throughout most of the years the program endured, inmates who donated plasma were paid $7 a unit. They could participate twice a week. As a board member, Roberts said he figured: “If we quit this project, who gets hurt? The inmates get hurt. I think I was willing to go along for that reason.” In addition, it was understood that the ADC made some profit from its contract with the plasma wholesaler. Most news reports from the 1980s that mentioned the contract at all said the ADC took half the proceeds from the plasma operation. But, as records in Roberts' files reveal, there was more to the plasma deal than consideration of inmates' needs — or even money to help run the state's prisons. ‘A time bomb' In the early '80s, the ADC contracted with Health Management Associates both to provide medical services in the prisons and to run the plasma program. HMA's president was Leonard Dunn, a Pine Bluff banker, whom Clinton later appointed to the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. Dunn would eventually chair the finance committee for Clinton's final gubernatorial campaign. But HMA ran into serious problems, both in delivering the prisons' overall medical services and in running the plasma program. It did not help, in Roberts' view, that Clinton had appointed HMA's attorney, Don Smith, to serve on the seven-member Board of Correction. In January 1984, Roberts, who was not yet on the prison board, advised Clinton in a letter that he considered it improper for Smith “to be serving on a board that controls a five-million-dollar contract with a firm he represents.” In the same letter, Roberts warned Clinton that HMA was “a time bomb waiting to blow up in somebody's face.” In fact, by the time Roberts wrote that letter, the time bomb had already exploded. Months earlier, in the summer of 1983, the FDA had learned that HMA had sold 38 units of plasma drawn from inmates who were known to have tested positive for hepatitis. The products were recalled, but not quickly enough. Almost four thousand vials of product made from the unsafe plasma were sent around the world, many for use by hemophiliacs. The following year, in 1985, Peter Longstaff in the U.K. tested positive for HIV. In the wake of that disaster, four U.S. companies that fractionated plasma into blood products stopped accepting prison plasma. Centers such as Arkansas's had to begin looking for new buyers. They contracted with brokers who sold the plasma abroad. But though state officials were willing to keep pumping inmate plasma onto the global market, problems in its operation were so severe that federal authorities blocked those plans — at least for a few months. The FDA revoked Arkansas's plasma license in February 1984. The agency cited a litany of problems, including drawing plasma from disqualified donors, altering records and improperly storing plasma. At the same time, the agency issued a warning that prisoners were more likely than the general population to be infected with the AIDS virus. The National Correctional Association responded to the alert. In 1984, it sent an “information bulletin” to its members, warning about plasma centers. In a section titled “Ethical and Moral Issues,” the bulletin noted that research showed that a higher percentage of prisoners were “illicit drug abusers before their incarceration,” and that, “because of the close living conditions of large groups of inmates, a high incidence of homosexual activity is found.” The bulletin noted that the consumers of blood products were already concerned about the level of “quality control” in prison centers. Most U.S. prisons stopped operating plasma programs entirely at this time. In Arkansas, however, plans were being made to restart the plasma program. And they continued, even when HMA's insurer dropped the company's coverage, in the summer of 1986. At that point, the prison board, which now included Roberts, hired an outside body, the Institute for Law and Policy Planning of Berkeley, Calif., to review HMA's performance. The ILPP returned a scathing report. Though the ILPP report did not focus on the plasma program, it concluded with this note: “HMA originally may have diverted the ADC's payments to support acquiring plasma centers, or to other purposes that may well warrant further inquiry. In any event, it was early in the five-year contract period that HMA established a pattern of contract shortfalls, and ADC accepted them. For HMA, all this must be viewed as profit-motivated business decision making, at best. At worst, it calls for further inquiry.” Roberts observed, “I don't have a particular problem with contracting, but those guys didn't know what they were doing. I think it was an insider, Pine Bluff deal. Those were companies set up specifically for doing business with the ADC.” Not surprisingly, further inquiry was not forthcoming. Instead, the ADC negotiated to revive the plasma program, this time with a newly formed company, Pine Bluff Biological Products. It was clearly a “profit-motivated business.” The deal At the time, a unit of plasma could be sold to an international blood broker for at least $50 per liter. According to Roberts' records, PBBP reported collecting an average of 960 units of plasma a week in fiscal year 1986. Calculated at a conservative selling rate of $50 per unit, that volume of plasma grossed approximately $2.5 million that year. According to PBBP's contract, the ADC was to receive $5 for every unit of plasma collected. So here's how the numbers looked in a year when the median income in Arkansas was half what it is today — and when the scourge of contaminated blood products was beginning to be felt around the world: Of PBBP's $2.5 million in annual gross sales, $350,000 went to pay inmates their $7-per-unit fees. The state of Arkansas collected $249,600 for prison operations. PBBP had gross revenues of $1,896,969. What the company netted is proprietary information. However, Arkansas's contract allowed PBBP to use the ADC's plasmapheresis center at the Cummins unit without charge, while the ADC provided all utilities and janitorial services, as well as “access” to inmates at approved units “desiring to participate in the program.” That included busing some inmates to the center. For its part, PBBP agreed to “assume responsibility/liability for all plasma product(s) produced.” The company was also required to maintain appropriate licensure and provide necessary professional staff, though the ADC also contributed inmates to work in the operation. “I think the inmates were looked on sort of as little cows,” Roberts said. That said, Roberts rejects critics' charges that Arkansas should have abandoned its plasma program as unsafe in the mid-1980s, when most other states did — and that it certainly should not have revived it, handing the contract to PBBP, after the FDA pulled HMA's license. “At first, there was not much concern about the quality of the blood supply,” Roberts says. “Then the FDA came out with that study that said prison plasma was more likely to be tainted. “I deny the premise. I disagree that prison plasma blood was more dangerous than what was coming out of the for-profit places in the free world. Out there, anybody could bleed anybody.” Roberts bases his confidence in the state's plasma program on the fact that, unlike downtown plasma centers, the ADC had medical records on every inmate who participated. It knew who was safe to bleed, he says, and who wasn't. Yet that defense suffers, even as Roberts offers it. He admits, “We always had problems with medical care. We had particular problems because of our history, because of having been more of a torture chamber, at times, than a prison.” So, even as Roberts says he disagrees “with the whole damn premise” that prison plasma was riskier than its paid-for free-world counterpart, he acknowledges that, “That does not absolve us from what went on in actual implementation of the program.” “We did not monitor it well,” he said, “and that's terrible.” ‘A dying program' PBBP made millions in the late 1980s on its contract with the ADC. But, by 1990, as the scale of the global Hepatitis C and HIV disaster began to be understood, PBBP found it increasingly difficult to find buyers. As a result, prices were plummeting. An ADC official secretly amended the plasma contract, cutting the share of money the PBBP would pay to inmates and the state. Even so, the plasma center operated at a loss. When the renegotiated contract came to light, officials with the ADC and PBBP begged the board of correction to keep the program going — allegedly for the sake of the inmates. PBBP's president, Jimmy Lord, told the board, “I think that it's a dying program, but I also think we will be in it as long as anyone else in the country.” He was right. Arkansas was the last state in the United States to close its prison plasma operation. In March 1991, the board voted not to renew PBBP's contract. By then, Roberts had been forced off the board. In 1988, he headed the library at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and Knox Nelson had found a law forbidding state employees from serving on state boards. In Roberts' resignation letter to Clinton, he wrote: “There have been days when I was truly proud of the changes that we were able to make, and there were other times when the sadness of not being able to correct the problem was almost overwhelming.” The “problem” he referred to was Lockhart. As Roberts put it in the letter, “I have only one regret about the whole experience and that is that when I had to leap over the cliff, I did not have Art by the nuts when I went down.” In 1992, the year after the plasma program closed, Peter Longstaff tested positive for Hepatitis C. In March of that same year, as Clinton was running for president, his former chief of staff, Betsey Wright, sent a memo titled “prison positives.” That memo, a copy of which is in Roberts' files, mentioned four points, including, “education into prison by bc.” But the first point Wright listed was: “Run cheapest system in country.” In 1994, Longstaff and Grayson began their campaign to expose how tainted blood had been able to make its way into their country. In a recent interview by email, Grayson wrote, “My husband was so disgusted at the blood-for-money trade he began a very public treatment strike in 2000, refusing human plasma products from paid donors. He believed that paying people for their blood was immoral and exploited impoverished people around the world. “The most recent example of this is Henan province in China, where many villagers that sold their blood are now infected with HIV, as the blood-heads that collected the plasma re-used equipment. The safety [warnings] echoed those in U.S. prisons 20 years before, showing that lessons still needed to be learnt.” Noting Clinton's recent efforts to lower the price of AIDS drugs for people in the developing world, Grayson added that she would soon be writing to the former president “to request that he addresses what happened in Arkansas” and to ask that he “calls for a global ban on the use of paid plasma donors.” Canada's Red Cross guilty in HIV scandal Distributed tainted blood killing thousands at time of deal with Bill Clinton's Arkansas The Canadian Red Cross pleaded guilty to distributing blood tainted with HIV and [COLOR=blue !important][COLOR=blue !important]hepatitis [COLOR=blue !important]C[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR] in a health disaster that has killed more than 3,000 people. The organization, which distributed the blood in the 1980s, paid a fine of $4,000 for causing more than 1,000 Canadians to contract blood-borne HIV and as many as 20,000 to become infected with hepatitis C. As part of the plea deal yesterday, Canadian Red Cross Secretary General Dr. Pierre Duplessis issued a public apology via videotape that was played in the courtroom to survivors of the victims. "[The] Canadian Red Cross Society is deeply sorry for the [COLOR=blue !important][COLOR=blue !important]injury[/COLOR][/COLOR] and death ... for the suffering caused to families and loved ones of those who were harmed," said Duplessis. As WorldNetDaily reported, Bill Clinton was at the center of a scandal in Arkansas in the 1980s involving the sale of AIDS-tainted blood to Canada, which was distributed through the Red Cross. As governor of Arkansas, Clinton awarded a contract to Health [COLOR=blue !important][COLOR=blue !important]Management[/COLOR][/COLOR] Associates to provide medical care to the state's prisoners. The president of the company was a long-time friend and political ally of Clinton and later was appointed by him to the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. Later, he was among the senior members of Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial re-election team. The death toll from the tainted blood has grown since the figure of 3,000 was calculated in 1997, but recent estimates are not available, the Associated Press reported. Duplessis said the organization accepted responsibility for "having distributed harmful products for those that rely on us for their health." Prosecutors dropped criminal charges, including criminal negligence and common nuisance. The Canadian Red Cross already has paid victims $55 million in a separate fund. Along with the fine, the charity will set aside $1.2 million for scholarships for family members of victims. The Arkansas connection to Canada's blood scandal began with a deal Health Management Associates struck with the state allowing collection and sale of prisoners' blood in addition to treatment. Because of the exploding AIDS crisis, U.S. regulations did not permit the sale of prisoners' blood within the country. But HMA found a willing buyer in Montreal, which brokered a deal with Connaught, a Toronto blood-fractionator, which didn't know the source of the supplies. Sales continued until 1983, when HMA revealed that some of the [COLOR=blue !important][COLOR=blue !important]plasma[/COLOR][/COLOR] might be contaminated with the [COLOR=blue !important][COLOR=blue !important]AIDS [COLOR=blue !important]virus[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR] and hepatitis. The blood was also marketed overseas. Michael Galster, who conducted [COLOR=blue !important][COLOR=blue !important]orthopedic[/COLOR][/COLOR]  clinics in the Arkansas prison system during the period the blood was collected, charged HMA officials knew the blood was tainted as they sold it to Canada and a half-dozen other foreign countries. He also alleged Clinton knew of the scheme and likely benefited from it financially. http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44529 Peace be upon you
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| The Following 5 Warriors Say Asante sana to Pragmatic For This Useful Post: | ||
 AMD1588 (11-20-2009), Eka (11-01-2009), MShakur (10-18-2009),  MsLioness (10-26-2009), tanya f. baby (10-26-2009) | ||
Award winner, Topic Of The Week 42, October, 2009
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10-22-2009
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| Talk about a conflict of interest AVI BioPharma Recipient of $28M Biodefense Contract Dec 4 2006, 12:11 PM EST GEN News Highlights AVI BioPharma executed a two-year $28-million research contract with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The contract will fund AVI’s development of antisense therapeutics to treat the effects of Ebola, Marburg, and Junin hemorrhagic viruses, which are seen as biological warfare and bioterrorism agents. “This partnership with DTRA and the DoD serves as validation of AVI’s Neugene® antisense approach to gene silencing in general, as well as specific confirmation of AVI’s concept of rapid response therapeutics,” points out Alan P. Timmins, president and COO of AVI. “We believe that through this contract we will continue to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of our Neugene technology plus AVI’s ability to develop and produce countermeasures for a broad spectrum of existing and emerging biothreat agents.” AVI BioPharma Obtains Expanded DoD Contract Worth $11.5M for Its Junin Virus Infection Treatment Oct 5 2009, 11:24 AM EST GEN News Highlights AVI BioPharma has received expanded contract funding of approximately $11.5 million from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency's (DTRA) Transformational Medical Technologies Initiative (TMTI). The money will support development of an IND application for AVI-7012 in the treatment of Junin virus infection. To date the DoD has reportedly commissioned AVI for work potentially worth up to $45.4 million. The contracts cover development of the company’s RNA-based drug candidates to treat Ebola, Marburg, and Junin virus infections (AVI-6002, AVI-6003, and AVI-7012, respectively). The current funding is a second amendment and expansion of the original contract from DTRA, which was awarded in November 2006 for $28 million and has been fully authorized. The first amendment was issued in May with an additional $5.9 million. AVI-6002, AVI-6003, and AVI-7012 are novel analogs based on AVI's PMO antisense chemistry in which antiviral potency is enhanced by the addition of positively charged components to the morpholino oligomer backbone. “AVI has recently been able to confirm the impressive and dose-related survival of drug-treated nonhuman primates in large dose titration studies for Ebola and Marburg virus infections, which were carried out in collaboration with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases,” according to Patrick Iverson, svp for strategic alliances at AVI. “Importantly, these studies allowed us to unequivocally demonstrate the sequence-specific nature of the protection afforded by our drug candidates.” AVI has received a “safe to proceed” allowance from the FDA for Phase I trials with its Ebola and Marburg candidates. These INDs represent the first TMTI-supported compounds targeting bioterrorism agents to receive FDA IND allowance, according to the firm. Peace be upon you Bioenterprise Leeds
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| tanya f. baby (10-26-2009) | ||
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10-24-2009
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 Obama declares swine flu national emergency
Order could speed up treatments by waiving certain medical standards msnbc.com news services updated 12:06 p.m. PT, Sat., Oct . 24, 2009 WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama has signed a proclamation declaring swine flu a national emergency, the White House said Saturday. The order gives his health chief the power to let hospitals move emergency rooms offsite to speed treatment and protect noninfected patients. Administration officials said the declaration was a pre-emptive move designed to make decisions easier when they need to be made. Officials said the move was not in response to any single development. Health and Human Services chief Kathleen Sebelius now has authority to bypass federal rules when opening alternative care sites, such as offsite hospital centers at schools or community centers if hospitals seek permission Some hospitals have opened drive-thrus and drive-up tent clinics to screen and treat swine flu patients. The idea is to keep infectious people out of regular emergency rooms and away from other sick patients. Hospitals could modify patient rules — for example, requiring them to give less information during a hectic time — to quicken access to treatment, with government approval, under the declaration. It also addresses a financial question for hospitals — reimbursement for treating people at sites not typically approved. For instance, federal rules do not allow hospitals to put up treatment tents more than 250 yards away from the doors; if the tents are 300 yards or more away, typically federal dollars won't go to pay for treatment. Administration officials said those rules might not make sense while fighting the swine flu, especially if the best piece of pavement is in the middle of a parking lot and some medical centers already are putting in place parts of their emergency plans. The national emergency declaration was the second of two steps needed to give Sebelius extraordinary powers during a crisis. On April 26, the administration declared swine flu a public health emergency, allowing the shipment of roughly 12 million doses of flu-fighting medications from a federal stockpile to states in case they eventually needed them. At the time, there were 20 confirmed cases in the U.S. of people recovering easily. There was no vaccine against swine flu, but the CDC had taken the initial step necessary for producing one. More widespread than ever Swine flu is more widespread now than it's ever been, and has resulted in more than 1,000 U.S. deaths so far, officials said Friday. Flu illnesses are as widespread now as they are at the winter peak of normal flu seasons, Thomas Frieden, director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters. "To be basically in the peak of flu season in October is extremely unusual," he said. "We expect that influenza will occur in waves and we can't predict how high, how far or how long the wave will go or when the next will come," he added. "Many millions" of Americans have had swine flu so far, according to an estimate he gave at a Friday press conference. The government doesn't test everyone to confirm swine flu so it doesn't have an exact count. Frieden updated some other estimates, too, saying there have been more than 20,000 hospitalizations. Nearly 100 swine flu deaths in children have been reported, CDC officials also said. Forty-six states now have widespread flu activity. The only states without widespread flu are Connecticut, Hawaii, New Jersey and South Carolina. There are at least two different types of flu causing illnesses; tests from about 5,000 patients suggest that nearly all the flu cases are swine flu. 'Frustrating' production delays This year's seasonal flu vaccine won't protect against swine flu; a separate swine flu vaccine is needed. Vaccine production takes several months, and the work on seasonal vaccine was already well under way when swine flu was first identified in April. It was too late for the swine flu virus to be included in the seasonal doses. Because of swine flu vaccine production delays, the government has backed off initial, optimistic estimates that as many as 120 million vaccine doses would be available by mid-October. As of Wednesday, only 11 million doses had been shipped to health departments, doctor's offices and other providers across the country, CDC officials said. "It's frustrating to all of us. We wish there were more vaccine available," Frieden said. The flu virus has to be grown in chicken eggs, and the yield hasn't been as high as was initially hoped, CDC officials explained. "Even if you yell at them, they don't grow faster," Frieden said. He added that 5 million new doses became available in the past week, and vaccine should be more plentiful soon. Much of the vaccine currently available is a nasal spray from AstraZeneca's unit MedImmune. The Obama administration has ordered vaccine from five manufacturers: Sanofi-Aventis SA, CSL Ltd, Novartis AG, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca's MedImmune. Also Friday, federal health officials said more Americans have been vaccinated against seasonal flu this fall than ever before by this time of year. Sixty million people have gotten the winter flu vaccine — probably because they're paying more attention to flu warnings in general, thanks to swine flu. It's an unprecedented number of seasonal flu shots for October; most usually aren't given until later in the fall. Part of it is due to supply: There are already 85 million doses of seasonal flu vaccine available, a much larger amount than usual for this early in the fall. Most years, roughly 100 million doses are used during the season. But a big factor probably is that swine flu is drawing attention to public health warnings that seasonal flu is also a deadly illness that can be prevented through vaccinations, said Joe Quimby, a spokesman for the CDC. "There's been a heightened awareness in the American public due to H1N1 this year," said Quimby. Global figures Also Friday, the World Health Organization reported more than 414,000 laboratory confirmed cases of H1N1 worldwide, with nearly 5,000 deaths. But the Geneva-based health agency noted that the figures were only the tip of the iceberg. "As many countries have stopped counting individual cases, particularly of milder illness, the case count is significantly lower than the actual number of cases that have occurred," WHO said. Peace be upon you 2 page story at link below: Obama: Swine flu a national emergency - Swine flu- msnbc.com
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10-26-2009
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Sometimes we can only wish that these things were conspirital. smh the only thing offered to "illegal immigrants" is free vaccinations.
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