[iowamark]

Also see:

John Carlson Des Moines Register column

[iowamark]

Every day of her adult life — at least until she became too ill — she went to Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Monticello. Her sons' funeral cards were always with her.

Faith, she said again and again, is what got her through it all.

That and strength, a tiny woman holding up an entire family.

"I live from day to day and keep going," she once told me. "I go to Mass every morning. That seems to be where I can get relief. . . . I just can't believe the six of them (her sons) are gone. I think about it, and I just can't believe it."

[Vaquero]

This is all very sad. These are the minority AIDS patients, the true victims. The involuntary ones.

The company I worked for back 1979 and into the early 1980's produced vast quantities of AHF or Anti Hemophilic Factor(sometimes known as clotting factor). This was before the AIDS thing became a known factor. This factor was produced by pooling vast quantities of fresh frozen Human Plasma and then in thawing it the first solid out, Cryoprecipitate would be further processed into the AHF. Now instead of having one or 2 donors, you were taking a serum pooled from thousands of people with who knows what disease. My company and other companies literally killed off a good chunk of the people who were our customers for the drug. We of course had to stop production and it was more than a couple of years before we started producing AHF again, though this time we had developed a proprietary virus inactivation method still used to this day for various human blood serums.

[DoughtyOne]

In the early days of the HIV scare, I thought it should have been treated as a communicable disease. It was my opinoin that a registry should have been developed, and that people with the disease should have been put on notice as to what would and would not be acceptable behavior.

C Everet Coop and the CDC felt different. No, this was not a disease of one focus group. It's affects would be felt across the population base. Well, how right they were.

People with HIV felt no compulsion to avoid giving blood. High risk groups were not warned to avoid it. Yes, how right they were. Coop and the CDC made damned sure their predictions came to fruition. The general public was exposed.

Many innocent children and adults who were leading wholesome lives were exposed to a disease that they never should have been exposed to. And still folks wear the ribbons as an affirmation that a certain segment of our society, will never be held to account for their personal choices.

Today bath houses where sexual acts are committed with multiple partners on a daily basis, remain open. Personal decisions remain above reproach.

Mary Goedken of Monticello has died. God rest her soul, and the souls of her other family members. In God's own time, I'm not so sure He's going to be as kind to some other people whose decisions both public and private have cost so many so much.

[Blueflag]

A sad undercurrent story here is a couple who are apparently homozygous recessive for hemophilia conceiving multiple sons with hemophilia, and two daughters as genetic carriers.

Perhaps they didn't know - she was in her 90s.

We have family-tree relations who chose NOT to have children because they knew, genetically, that their offspring WOULD have a fatal defect.

Tough choices. Known outcomes.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Follow the money: How much of this Blood trail leads from the contaminated blood deliberately sold by Clinton's Arkansas prison blood programs?

[AppyPappy]

Gee I wonder how AIDS got into the blood system. Hemophiliacs can't give blood.

[Petronski]

Mary Goedken . . . the matriarch of an Iowa family that lost eight people to AIDS, has died.

Matriarch of family that lost seven to AIDS dies