The Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) has said it cannot be certain that blood it sold to commercial companies was not used to manufacture pharmaceutical products for human use. Dr Muiris Houston, Medical Correspondent, reports.
It confirmed yesterday that a small but unknown quantity of blood and blood product was either sold or donated to the pharmaceutical and medical devices industry in the 1980s and 1990s.
Tánaiste and Minister for Health, Ms Harney, last night said she was "disturbed" to learn of the practice.
Opposition health spokesman Dr Liam Twomey said he was "appalled" by the revelations.
"I think the saddest outcome of all this will be that donors could be put off giving blood for life-saving operations," he said.
The IBTS has incomplete records on transactions that took place before 1995 but estimates 23 companies received blood for commercial use. It said it could trace payments of around IR£80,000 (€101,580) it received for blood sold to industry.
The IBTS, which receives over 150,000 voluntary donations each year, said it supplied 3,800 units of blood products between 1983 and 2002. Asked if blood products donated or sold to the pharmaceutical industry could have been used to manufacture any human medicine or vaccine, the medical director of the IBTS, Dr William Murphy, told The Irish Times: "As far as we know, we are not aware of human use."
He said that as far as he could tell, most of the blood was used to calibrate instruments and for other research purposes.
Dr Murphy said that when he became aware of the practice of providing blood product to commercial companies, "it struck me as quite an unusual practice. The extent and scale was most surprising."
In a statement, the IBTS named six companies that received blood or blood products. The pharmaceutical company Warner Lambert "regularly received discarded units of whole blood" in the early 1980s, for which it was not charged.
Organon Technica (Ireland) received an average of two units a week between 1987 and 1997. Technica, now owned by Bayer, received discarded whole blood. The company manufactures blood assay machines for use in hospitals and laboratories. It appears to have had an arrangement whereby Technica members of staff were bled in Pelican House as blood donors and in return fresh units of blood were sent to the company on a one for one basis.
Dr Murphy issued a memo in March 1997 discontinuing the practice of providing donated blood to industry, but allowing it to be given to universities and hospitals.
However, the Munster Regional Transfusion Centre of the IBTS assumed the definition of healthcare institution to include some commercial companies. As a result, blood continued to be supplied by it to Trinity Biotech, Olympus Diagnostica and Shandon Clinic until March 2002.
The IBTS said last night that the supply of blood to all sources, commercial and academic, had now ceased.