Letters - 26 April 2013
From blood donation to the failure of success
Blood and flesh
We are grateful to see correspondence regarding blood and organ donation (12 and 19 April). We are also extremely grateful to all those blood donors who have helped our daughter, Ros, back to health after life-threatening bleeds owing to her bleeding disorder, von Willebrands disease.
We are not grateful to those prisoners on ‘Skid Row’ in the USA, who donated blood contaminated with Hepatitis C and HIV viruses. These donations were used by US pharmaceutical companies to manufacture blood products to treat people with haemophilia and other bleeding disorders. Such products were imported to the UK by the NHS to save on the expense of deriving similar products from British donors, despite warnings from US medical experts.
As Frank Boulton says, donations must be carefully screened to see that nothing contaminates the donation. Ros contracted Hepatitis C through her NHS treatment with blood products and has many health problems because of it. Her story is the subject of my book Funny Blood. It is available from us or from Quacks publishers.
Juliet and John Batten
The failure of success
Reading the review of Jennifer Kavanagh’s book The Failure of Success by Michael Wright (5 April), I was reminded of the lines of a song. In ‘Love Minus Zero, No Limit’, Bob Dylan wrote:
My love she speaks softly She knows there’s no success like failure And that failure’s no success at all A paradox expressed with poetic brevity.
Barry Williamson
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