Blood service not motivated by profits, tribunal is told

Decisions of the Blood Transfusion Service Board were never improperly compromised by financial considerations, counsel for the State agency told the tribunal yesterday.

Mr Frank Clarke SC said the BTSB had "proper regard" for financial matters, but the allegation that it was motivated by profits in its decision to distribute commercial concentrates for drugs firms was not well-founded.

Mr Clarke said it was clear from the evidence of Mr Edward A. Ryan, a former accounts and personnel officer with the board, that the "surplus" earned from such distribution was not the motivation and did not lead to "improper compromise" of decisions.

He noted there was nothing wrong in itself in earning a profit on product supply, as the BTSB had to balance its books. Just as the agency was a not-for-profit organisation, he said it was also meant to be "a not-for-loss operation".

In the second and final day of his closing submission, Mr Clarke again criticised the Irish Haemophilia Society's legal team for making what he said were unfounded allegations, in this case against former BTSB senior technical officer, the late Seβn Hanratty.

Mr Clarke said the BTSB had been asked by the family of Mr Hanratty to inform the tribunal of the "great distress and upset" caused to them by unsubstantiated insinuations of improper dealings or conduct.

Mr Hanratty had been accused of having a conflict of interest by being a shareholder in a pharmaceutical company, Accu-Science, which supplied blood products to the board.

He was named at the tribunal as the official in charge of a department which, in 1993, the year he retired from the board, destroyed 20 years of dispatch records in contravention of a BTSB executive order.

Mr Clarke said the issues had been investigated at the time by the BTSB and no evidence of improper conduct had been found. In light of the fact that criticism had been aired about Mr Hanratty at the tribunal, Mr Clarke asked the chairwoman to make a finding in this regard.

He defended the BTSB's record on a range of issues, from its non-achievement of self-sufficiency in blood products to its failure to introduce a "look-back" programme to trace what happened to HIV-positive blood donations after testing had been introduced.

On the matter of heat-treating its blood products to kill the AIDS virus, Mr Clarke said the BTSB's timing in introducing this precaution did not seem to be "out of line" with the European experience. With the benefit of hindsight, it would have been better to have withdrawn non-heat-treated BTSB factor 9 after commercial heat-treated product came on the market. However, at the time, "all persons were to some extent groping in the dark".

Given there was a perceived thrombogenic risk attached to heat-treatment at the time, he said, it was not unreasonable for the BTSB to make a choice available for doctors so that they could decide which they felt was best.

He accepted it was not appropriate for the BTSB to continue issuing non-heat-treated factor 9 until December 1985 and said such issues should have stopped three months earlier when heat-treated products came on stream. However, there was "no cogent evidence" that the BTSB made a deliberate attempt to "dump" the untreated product in hospitals.

Concluding his statement, Mr Clarke said he wished to join the IHS legal team in appealing to members of the public to continue to donate blood.