A MEMBER of the senior technical staff at the Blood Transfusion Service Board (BTSB) yesterday agreed it was "extraordinary" that plasma which tested positive for hepatitis C four times at Pelican House continued to be used there in the making of anti D.
Mr Sean Keating, who has been senior technician in the hepatitis testing laboratory at the BTSB since 1973, told the inquiry into the hepatitis C scandal that a sample of Patient Y's plasma proved positive for hepatitis C on October 2nd, 1991.
A similar test the following day had the same result. Two further tests on the same sample in July 1992 also proved positive, but were significantly more so than in previous tests. He could not explain why the plasma was not removed from stock. "I don't know. I was not responsible for that," he said.
He agreed he attended weekly scientific meetings at the BTSB from "1988 or 1989", but could not remember Patient Y or hepatitis C testing ever being discussed there.
He explained that one hepatitis C test on the Patient Y sample had proved negative, and that two of the four positive tests were only marginally positive.
It was a "widely held view" in scientific circles at the time, he said, that the thawing of samples, as happened in this case, could result in "a false positive" effect.
He agreed that a request on November 18th, 1976, by the Coombe Hospital for a hepatitis B test on plasma from Patient X, had a note added which read: "Mild jaundice. Recent history of multiple plasma exchanges. Query hepatitis B." Accompanying that note were 33 specimen samples from Patient X.
The tests proved negative. Mr Keating agreed that before Dr O'Riordan, the chief medical consultant at the BTSB, signed Patient X's test results for forwarding to the Coombe, he would have had a copy of the hospital's "jaundice" note.
He agreed that in October 1976 he had written an article in Converse, a magazine for laboratory staff, about the possibility of there being a hepatitis C virus. He wrote: "There is increasing suspicion that there is, as yet unrecognised, another human hepatitis virus (hepatitis C)."
The virus was discovered in the US eight years later. He agreed that at the end of that article he had acknowledged the assistance of Dr O'Riordan and his own immediate superiors at the BTSB, Mr Hanratty and Mr Cann, in preparing it.
