Prof Ian Temperley apologised yesterday for displaying the initials of haemophiliacs who had been infected with HIV. This had occurred at a public conference at the height of the AIDS crisis.
The doctor and former medical director of the National Haemophilia Treatment Centre agreed it had not occurred to him how the decision to display the initials might have affected individuals at the conference, in June 1986.
Among those attending the lecture was Mr Brian O'Mahony, chairman of the Irish Haemophilia Society and a haemophiliac himself, who told the tribunal last year that he was shocked and appalled at what happened.
"These people were not initials to me. I knew some of these people," he said, adding that had he been infected "it would have been announced at a public meeting in UCD".
Prof Temperley said he had displayed the initials so that it would be easier for him to talk about the patients' medical problems at the lecture. The incident was obviously "more than embarrassing," he said, and he apologised.
It was at this public conference, the tribunal heard, that Prof Temperley first made public his concern that BTSB-made Factor 9 might have been responsible for infecting several haemophilia B patients with HIV.
At the time, he said, he was not sure whether it was heat-treated or non-heat-treated Factor 9 which was responsible, although he suspected it was the latter. The reality became clear to him only when the blood bank's deputy medical director, Dr Emer Lawlor, carried out a study of the infections in the late 1990s, he said.
Earlier counsel for Prof Temperley, Mr Brian McGovern SC, claimed his client had been subjected this week to a "scandalous" and "unfair" attack outside the inquiry.
He said certain statements had been made during an interview last Thursday on Today FM's Last Word radio show about the conduct of the tribunal and his client, and he was satisfied some of the remarks were scandalous, outrageous and most unfair.
During the interview with broadcaster Eamon Dunphy, Mr Raymond Kelly, whose son, John, died from AIDS in 1994, criticised aspects of Prof Temperley's evidence and raised questions about the treatment of the IHS at the inquiry by counsel for the tribunal, Mr John Finlay SC.
The chairwoman, Judge Alison Lindsay, said yesterday that she had not heard the interview, but she would obtain a transcript and make her views known next Tuesday.
In other evidence yesterday, Prof Temperley said he had no reason to suspect in 1986 that there was anything unsatisfactory with an Armour Factor 8 product which, it has since emerged, probably infected one haemophilia A patient in February that year.
The doctor said he received a letter from Armour in March 1986 indicating that the company was "a bit twitchy" about the product. By May a "vague rumour" was circulating.
It was not until September that Armour issued a statement withdrawing its Factor 8.
The doctor said he believed he used the product only up to late summer 1986.
