One discovery causing alarm among doctors is AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), which has an extremely high death rate. Dr. Joseph Bove continued:

“For recipients, physicians must weigh the risk of transfusion against the expected benefit. This concept is not new but has become more pressing, since one can no longer assure an anxious patient that he or she will not get AIDS from transfusion.”

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A Frightened Pediatrician

Professor James Oleske recently admitted:

“What is frightening to me as a pediatrician and immunologist . . . is that we’re still in an alarming period when a large number of blood transfusions have been given to premature infants before we knew about AIDS . . . If in the late 70s and early 80s our blood supply was in fact contaminated with the AIDS agent, then a lot of preemies may have been exposed . . . The problem is there is no simple screening test for AIDS and without that diagnostic test there really is no way of telling who may be incubating it but feels healthy and can donate blood.”​—Data Centrum, January 1984.

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Blood​—Gift of Life?

“When Sam Kushnick died last October, his family wanted to bury him in a Jewish prayer shawl and in his favorite shoes. But undertakers didn’t want to touch his body; the death certificate said that he had died of AIDS​—Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

“What is unusual about the Kushnick case isn’t that an AIDS victim was treated in death as a pariah. What is remarkable is that Sam was only three years old and belonged to none of the principal risk groups for the disease​—promiscuous homosexuals, Haitians and heroin addicts. The little Los Angeles boy was one of a small but growing number of AIDS casualties who contracted the disease after receiving blood.” (The Wall Street Journal, March 12, 1984, page 1.) Sam was born prematurely. As doctors in the hospital drew some of his blood for testing, they replaced it with transfusions of donor blood. After he developed AIDS at age two, the donors were traced. One was a homosexual who still manifests no symptoms of the disease that killed little Sam.