Bayer 'put Asians in Danger of Hiv'

A division of the German pharmaceutical company Bayer knowingly sold blood-clotting agents infected with the human immunodeficiency virus to Asia and Latin America months after withdrawing them from Europe and the US, a US newspaper claimed yesterday.

Cutter Biological continued to dump stocks of the Factor VIII blood-clotting agent for haemophiliacs on poor countries for nearly a year after introducing a safer alternative, the report in the New York Times said.

It happened in the early 80s, after the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, reported in July 1982 that haemophiliacs were becoming ill from blood products.

Up to that time Factor VIII, produced from the plasma of about 10,000 donors, was not screened for HIV, and it became a leading killer of haemophiliacs in the early years of Aids.

Although the concern raised by the CDC had percolated through internal Cutter documents the company, anxious about its slipping sales figures, publicly scoffed at the notion of Aids and that its products were a risk to haemophiliacs.

In June 1983, the newspaper reports, it wrote to its distributors in France and nearly 20 other countries saying: "Aids has become the centre of irrational response in many countries."

In February 1984, after the danger was incontrovertibly established, Cutter began selling plasma products which had been heat-treated, but it continued to export old stocks of Factor VIII to industrialised and poor countries for more than a year; in part to get rid of old stocks but also to preserve profitable long-term contracts.

In 1985, the Times reports, a company taskforce asked: "Can we in good faith continue to ship non-heat-treated coagulation products to Japan?"

It also found documents from 1984 directing a distributor in Hong Kong to use up the old produce before selling newer stocks, and advised doctors there who asked direct questions about the risk of HIV infection that its products were not hazardous.

"There is excess non-heated inventory," the minute of a November 1984 company meeting said.

Yesterday the company, which has paid $600m (£375) to settle lawsuits brought by thousands of American haemophiliacs infected by its products, defended its actions.

"Bayer has always behaved responsibly, ethically, and humanely," it said in a statement from its headquarters in Leverkusen, Germany.

"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 documents which formed the basis of the New York Times report were produced in connection with the lawsuits.

The total number of people in Asia and Latin America infected by HIV or who died from Aids after being treated with the products from Cutter is unclear, but the paper said that at least 100 were infected in Taiwan and Hong Kong alone.

Cutter appears to have exported more than 100,000 vials of the older product to Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan and Argentina.