YESTERDAY'S withdrawal of potentially infected blood supplies from Irish hospitals is just the latest in a series of controversies which have bedevilled the work of the Blood Transfusion Service Board (BTSB) during the past two years.
February 1994 The BTSB admitted that a number of women who received an Irish anti rhesus factor blood product between 1970 and 1991 could have contracted the Hepatitis C virus.
The board said a contaminated batch of the product anti D immunoglobulin may have been responsible for infecting a number of women with the then undiscovered virus in 1977.
Free nationwide screening was promised for women who had received the blood product since it was first used in 1970.
March 1995 The Minister for Health had to reassure the public after a report revealed that the BTSB had been storing blood in a "filthy outbuilding" and that its record keeping was "totally inadequate Mr Noonan confirmed details of the leaked report to the Dail, but said that while they amounted to unacceptable practice, they had not necessarily caused any contamination of blood products.
April 1995 The State faced compensation claims running into millions of pounds after a report on the use of contaminated blood found that the BTSB could provide no adequate explanation" for using plasma from a donor with jaundice which subsequently infected recipients with Hepatitis
Out of 56,000 women who were screened for the virus after the risk was made public, more than 1,000 tested positive to Hepatitis C antibodies in at least two blood tests. More than 420 tested positive for the virus it sell, and up to 40 had received treatment for liver damage as a result.
The Fine Gael TD, Mr Alan Shatter, called on the DPP to consider criminal prosecutions of those responsible for what he called the "blood bank scandal".
May 1995 The Minister for Health approved a plan for a "root and branch" reorganisation of the board.
September 1995 The BTSB said it had discarded a consignment of harmless blood, because some of it came from a donor with a mild form of hepatitis.
