The heat-treatment used by the Blood Transfusion Service Board for most of 1986 to virally inactivate its Factor 9 blood-clotting agent was effectively useless, counsel for the Irish Haemophilia Society claimed at the tribunal.
Mr John Trainor SC, reading from minutes of a meeting of the BTSB in July 1986, said it appeared their heat-treatment to kill the HIV virus was changed after one of its technical staff, Mr John Keating, attended an international conference on AIDS in Paris. He reported back that the minimum heat-treatment now recommended was 60 degrees for 72 hours.
Counsel suggested to Mr Keating that those at the meeting must have been startled when he delivered this news. There would have been the sudden realisation that the method they were using - 60 degrees for 20 hours - had been "useless".
Mr Keating said he did not recall their reaction. Heat-treatment was not his area of expertise.
Mr Trainor suggested that he was making a radical proposal to call back donors for testing rather than recall stock which might be unsafe from hospital shelves.
Mr Keating insisted this was not so, that he was talking about the testing of donor samples which would have been retained, and not the patients or donors they came from. He said all blood donations were tested for HIV from October 1985.
It was further alleged by Mr Trainor yesterday that the BTSB was more concerned about how many donors would be lost if it began testing blood for non-A, non-B hepatitis (which later became known as hepatitis C) than about safety.
An internal BTSB memo showed the board chose to conduct a pilot study to determine the possible effect of screening on donor numbers before deciding whether to introduce the test.
The cost of the study was £6,000 and it found that four in every 100 donors could be possible carriers.
Mr Trainor said studies had shown that the use of these marker or surrogate tests for non-A, non-B hepatitis (NANBH) had a 40 per cent success rate in preventing transmission of NANBH. But the tests were not introduced by the BTSB, after failing to get the approval of the minister for health.
Mr Keating, whose idea the pilot study was, said in evidence that safety was his main concern, but that it was necessary to see what effect the tests would have on the board's blood supply. Up to 24 donors would be deferred every day.
Mr Trainor suggested to Mr Keating that as head of bloodtesting he should have kept stressing the importance of the tests when they were not implemented. Mr Keating said this was a matter for those in more senior roles.