A conflict of evidence over the timeliness of the Blood Transfusion Service Board's decision to produce native blood products through specialist contractors emerged at the Lindsay tribunal yesterday.
Dr Bernard Horowitz, a senior researcher with the New York Blood Center, said the notion of "contract fractionation", whereby small blood transfusion centres got manufacturers to produce concentrates from locally sourced plasma, was "hardly novel" in 1985.
This contradicts the evidence of a number of witnesses who suggested the BTSB was ahead of its time. Last July, Prof Willem van Aken, the former medical director of the Dutch blood transfusion service, said there were "certainly not" any countries much ahead of Ireland in exploiting the idea.
But Dr Horowitz said the New York centre had been fractionating products for other agencies in the US and Europe since 1979. He added most fractionators in the 1980s had the capacity to produce between 200,000 litres and 1 million litres of plasma. He said it would have been relatively easy to accommodate a "small volume" like 30,000 litres from the BTSB.
Dr Horowitz noted that contract fractionation provided numerous advantages to voluntary blood banks. They did not have to invest heavily in manufacturing equipment and it also gave them flexibility, allowing them to switch with greater ease to better and safer products. Asked whether it was preferable to have just one manufacturer dealing with production and viral inactivation, Dr Horowitz replied that there was nothing inherently wrong with joint manufacturing. But, he said, each party had to "respect its own responsibilities".
The tribunal has heard the BTSB engaged in one joint arrangement whereby a plasma by-product was returned by manufacturers to Ireland for production into factor 9, which was subsequently heat-treated at Pelican House. The BTSB later discovered its heat-treatment was insufficient to guard against hepatitis C, but by then a number of haemophiliacs were infected.
Dr Horowitz said his research centre, which in 1985 developed a landmark solvent detergent method of making blood products safe from viruses, had a concern over "post-treatment contamination". The centre recommended strict controls over the movement of personnel and material, he said.
Meanwhile, the Southern Health Board confirmed yesterday it had entered into negotiations with the Irish Haemophilia Society about releasing privileged documents to the tribunal.
