Japan AIDS Blood Deaths: MHW Official Denies Guilt

Akihito Matsumura, a former senior official at Japan's Ministry ofHealth and Welfare, has pleaded not guilty in the second round of the HIV blood scandal trials. He was charged with professional negligence in the deaths of a hemophiliac in 1991 and a hepatic disease patient in 1995; both died of AIDS complications after contracting HIV from contaminated blood products.

The first round of the trials also saw a denial of guilt by Takeshi Abe, Japan's leading expert on hemophilia, who was indicted for alleged professional negligence in the 1991 death of a hemophiliac AIDS victim. Prosecutors claimed that Dr Abe, as policymaker for treatment of hemophiliacs at Teikyo University Hospital, was responsible for the use of unheated, HIV-contaminated blood products, and also that he intervened to delay clinical trials of a safe, heat-treated blood product by a foreign manufacturer before Japanese competitors were ready to start clinical testing of similar drugs.

Dr Abe was the first of five Japanese to be indicated in connection with the scandal; the second was Dr Matsumura, a medical doctor who headed the Ministry's biologics and antibiotics division during 1984-86. Dr Matsumura is charged with failure to order the recall of untreated blood products and failing to take other measures to prevent the HIV catastrophe after heat-treated agents were approved in July 1985. He said that he "did not have the authority," and that in the mid-1980s he thought few people infected with HIV from concentrated, unheated blood products would develop AIDS.