Blood Worries

The annual meeting of the American Association of Blood Banks in San Francisco last week was a long-awaited opportunity for warm handshakes and upbeat talk. During the past 18 months, health professionals have meticulously tested every pint of blood in the nation's reserves for the AIDS virus. The hugely successful effort, which costs more than $50 million annually, has rendered negligible a once ominous threat to recipients of blood transfusions. But the convention proceedings got a jolt when Dr. Luc Montagnier of Paris' Pasteur Institute informed the assembly that an AIDS virus called LAV-II, whose presence in two West Africans was announced last spring, has now been found in Western Europe. According to Montagnier, LAV-II does not necessarily show up in screening procedures for the original AIDS virus, and tests may have to be created to spot it. Said Montagnier, who with the National Cancer Institute's Dr. Robert Gallo is credited with discovering the original AIDS virus: "We are just at the beginning of the spread of a new virus. It is unavoidable at some time that LAV-II will reach the U.S."

"Everyone went, 'Oh God, here we go again,' " said Dr. Thomas Zuck, director of the Food and Drug Administration's division of blood and blood products. But Dr. Myron ("Max") Essex of the Harvard School of Public Health, a leading AIDS researcher, feels Montagnier's warning is premature. Essex, who last spring announced that his research team had discovered in Senegal a virus that is related to LAV-II, criticized the announcement as "unnecessarily frightening." Citing the fact that Montagnier's unpublished data were based on fewer than 100 patients, Essex said, "I don't want to put it down too vigorously, but there seem to be a lot of loose ends in the report."

French and Portuguese researchers disclosed the existence of LAV-II in March, after finding the new AIDS virus in the blood of two West Africans. At the time, Montagnier's colleague Dr. Francois Clavel warned that LAV-II could elude current blood-screening tests for AIDS. Since this virus appeared to be extremely rare, the risk to banked blood seemed small. Subsequent testing of West Africans, however, turned up 63 more victims infected with LAV-II; eleven of them have contracted AIDS, and ten have AIDS-related illnesses. Though no American has yet been found to harbor the new virus, Montagnier reported that one potential French donor has already tested positive for LAV-II and negative for the more common AIDS virus. Luckily, doctors were able to intercept the donation before it was used, as it had managed to cross-react with the original AIDS test.