Canadian blood was tainted

(First Edition)

Canada's Health Department knew that blood distributed to haemophiliacs in the 1980s was contaminated with the virus that causes Aids but could do nothing about it, according to a senior official, Greg Smith, AP reports from Ottawa.

'There was nothing to replace it with . . . You had to make some difficult medical choices', he said, between denying transfusions - thereby risking a patient's bleeding to death - or risking the patient developing Aids. A method for purging blood of HIV by heating it was not developed until 1985.