5-12-2012 - A Long Journey from AIDS

Grifols, a global healthcare company based in Barcelona, Spain, recently opened a new plasma testing laboratory in San Marcos, Texas, which will analyze millions of samples of human plasma annually before they are approved for further manufacturing into life-saving medicines for patients. It demonstrates yet again the plasma industry’s ethical and financial commitment to safety and commitment to the many critical-care patients who depend on these products.

We have come a long way from July 1982 when the Centers for Disease Control published in its magazine “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” that 3 patients with hemophilia had died that year with symptoms similar to those found in some homosexual men and Haitians, suggesting that members of all three groups were victims of a common, new and unknown syndrome. We did not know then that the blood system was contaminated. The word “AIDS” entered our vocabulary two years later. I was the executive director of the World Federation of Hemophilia in the latter years of the eighties and early nineties and saw too many wonderful people die because of contaminated blood products. The plasma industry can be proud of its determination to make sure that this would never happen again. And I am proud to belong to the industry.