Blood on Their Hands: How Greedy Companies, Inept Bureaucracy, and Bad Science Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs

This insider account from Weinberg, an attorney and visiting lecturer at Rutgers, and Shaw, associate professor of journalism at the College of New Jersey, chronicles the legal battle fought on behalf of hemophiliacs against a pharmaceutical industry that failed to protect them from the potential for contracting hepatitis and AIDS through their blood-clotting medicines. “Most people with severe hemophilia who regularly infused commercial clotting drugs between 1980 and 1985 contracted the AIDS virus,” the authors write. “Few involved in the devastation were willing to accept responsibility.” Weinberg, a member of the legal team behind a 1994 class action negligence lawsuit, lends astounding detail to the suffering of unwitting patients—including a nine-year-old boy—and their frustrating fight for justice. There was never a finding of criminal conduct in the case, though the legal action resulted in tighter product-safety regulations that limited further infections. The narrative can be as complicated and dense as the case it describes, and though the book’s pace suffers for it, the authors make a powerful and important case by unveiling the suffering that devastated families know “could have been entirely prevented.” [em]Agent: Jane Dystel, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Sept.) [/em]