Remembering the Arkansas Prison Blood Plasma Scandal

With Hillary Clinton running as Democrat for president of the United States, I feel it is important that everyone stop for a minuet and think about the "Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal." I think that some have never heard of it, and others maybe forgot about it.

When Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas in the middle 80's he contracted Health Management Associates to provide medical care for the Arkansas prison system according to Joseph Farah. The president of the company was allegedly a long time friend of Clinton.

The company was also offered a deal to take blood from prisoners in exchange for a small amount of money. Because prisoners blood was outlawed from being sold in the USA, this blood was sold to Canada, and overseas for a price of $70.00 a pint. According to Farah, approximately 5,000 to 8,000 pints of blood was shipped from one prison alone in just one week making millions of dollars.

Apparently HME exposed the blood tainted with AIDES and hepatitis, but the sale of the blood continued anyway. Author Micheal Galster exposed this scandal in his book titled "Blood Trail", using a pen name, and claimed Clinton knew the blood was tainted, and that he very well might have benefited financially from it. Farah reported that Michael Galster said to the Calgary Sun, "We now have solid evidence he not only knew about it, but he signed off on it." Galster also claimed that he had eyewitnesses that saw inmates using dirty needles to draw blood from each other. The tainted blood infected thousands of people worldwide, bringing the number of AIDS victims in the 80's extremely high.

"While researching the "Arkansas Prison Blood Plasma Scandal," I came across a website dedicated to one of the victims of this scandal. He was in the Cummins Unit in Arkansas at the time tainted blood was being drained from these inmates. Linda Tant Miller has put up this website for her beloved brother Buddy Tant. She states "My brother was a blood cow for the Arkansas Department of Corrections."

This website has photo's and information about this scandal. Some of these pictures are hard to look at, and the site itself broke my heart, but I feel at this time, with Hillary running for office, we should all think about this scandal. I am not saying that Hillary had anything to do with this, but if Bill profited, in my opinion than she must have too.

Sources:

http://www.venusproject.com/ethics_in_action/Clintons_Blood_Scandal.html

http://www.geocities.com/BloodCows/