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December 31, 2005
Blood debt
OVER the past four years, a quiet horror has unfolded in a remote quarter of Johor. Now that it has come to light, the plight of Puan Norizan Ismail, now 44, should be highlighted as a signal lesson on what should never have happened at all, and had better not happen again. Four years since being transfused with HIV-infected blood, Norizan, a mother of 10, has apparently developed full-blown AIDS.
Her body is peppered with pustules, and she is debilitated, weak anddespairing.
Just a year after the World Health Organisation had acknowledged that Malaysia had achieved 100 per cent screening of donated blood, Norizan joined the list of some 50 Malaysians infected with HIV this way. It is a tiny percentage of the total number of HIV infections, but it is all the more tragic for being an avoidable infector of innocents.
The WHO estimates tainted transfusions to be responsible for fewer than 10 per cent of HIV cases worldwide, higher in the developing world, lower in the West. The United States claims to have brought the odds down to one in half-a-million. With Malaysia priding itself on being among the most advanced developing nations in this regard, having begun donor-blood screening for HIV 20 years ago, hepatitis C in 1991 and achieved 100 per cent screening in 2000, Norizan’s case is all the more glaring.
Just this month, the National Blood Bank issued the sobering alert that six per cent of Malaysia’s blood donors are serving up blood tainted with infectious or sexually transmitted diseases — whether they know it or not. This year, there were some 8,500 cases of donated blood having to be destroyed for this reason. There should be cause here to trace every one of those donors (surely their names and addresses are on record) as they are either criminally negligent or unknowingly diseased, and in either case urgently need medical attention themselves.
But Norizan’s case has at least underscored the terrible consequences of negligence. Stepped-up preventive measures may help ensure hers is the last case of its kind, but they would hardly ease her suffering or lighten her family’s burdens. The palliative treatment and counselling offered her by the Segamat district hospital seems feeble compensation. Norizan and her husband were told they could sue the hospital, but have obviously lacked the wherewithal to consider that option. Perhaps it should be considered on their behalf — there was something of a precedent three years ago, when the Temerloh High Court awarded RM500,000 in general damages to eight-year-old Hanis Saidi, born HIV-positive at the Raub Hospital due to a blood transfusion administered his mother, who died of AIDS five years later.
Or perhaps the Segamat hospital, Johor Government and state medical authorities might pre-empt such a possibility with some pro-activity on their part, not just to assist this AIDS-stricken Felda family, but to reveal what measures were taken to investigate how this happened, determine culpability, and rectify the system. A vital confidence has been shaken, and needs to be restored. In recompense for such a fatal mistake, tea and sympathy is not enough.
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