Having lost two sons to AIDS and caring for a third infected with the HIV virus, the author chronicles the medical and legal plight of hemophiliacs infected through contaminiated medication
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Two of Elaine DePrince's sons, fifteen-year-old Mike and eleven-year-old Cubby, died of AIDS. They were hemophiliacs, and the medication they were given to control bleeding episodes was made from human plasma tainted with HIV. In the early 1980s, more than ten thousand hemophiliacs in the United States contracted AIDS in this way. Cry Bloody Murder is the story of how this medical catastrophe occurred and how one family coped with the devastating consequences.Elaine DePrince is angry. "The tragedy that felled my sons was not an act of God," she writes in her Introduction. "It was avoidable." The contaminated clotting factor used by hemophiliacs was licensed by the Food and Drug Administration and sold by companies who were slow to respond to reports of the problem. By the time adequate measures were taken to virally inactivate their products, it was too late for Cubby and Mike DePrince, and for their brother Teddy, who is living with AIDS with the help of the new generation of drugs that better manage HIV-related infections. The story of their illnesses, and of the extraordinary courage and grace of young Cubby, is heartbreaking.
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