BLOOD TRAIL LEADS TO WHITE HOUSE
SAM KNIGHT, CALGARY HERALD Calgary Herald; BOOKS; Pg. K11 November 21, 1998, Saturday, FINAL EDITION Blood Trail is a well-worked thriller on a simple literary level, but it is rendered much more powerful by the basis of truth on which it is constructed. It is a fictional, but theoretically possible, story about the tainted blood scandal that has infected more than 30,000 Canadians with either hepatitis C or AIDS through blood transfusions. The plot concerns a father whose son gets AIDS as a result of a transfusion he needed after being injured in a hunting accident. Zak then unwittingly passes the virus to his wife. His father, David Farr, is driven to trace the blood and discovers a conspiracy leading through the Arkansas prison system to its former governor and present president of the United States. No prizes for guessing who. "I honestly believe that records exist with Bill Clinton's name on them," said the author in a Herald interview. "He must have been fully knowledgeable." Recently "Michael Sullivan" revealed his true identity -- Michael Galster to give his cause more credence. He had used the pseudonym fearing for the lives of his wife, five children and himself. Galster has worked since the late '70s as a prosthetist in Arkansas and has had contracts with the state penitentiary, where he first suspected blood was being taken from prisoners and sold throughout North America. In 1978-79, inmates with jaundice came to his prosthetic clinic with bandages on their arms. He was shocked to find they had given blood, despite having infected livers. In his ignorance Galster assumed there must be a means of cleaning the blood before it reached the market. "The second red flag came when prisoners came to me asking for percodan, a narcotic," explained Galster. This was the currency with which prisoners were paid for their blood. The appalled Galster recalled the case of Danny Sanders, an inmate who, in his craving for the drug, injected himself in the knee with saliva which brings on a potentially fatal infection. Sanders ended up having his leg amputated at the hip and his family brought a legal suit against the penitentiary. Galster charted the existence of the health contractor, HMA, which conducted the blood operation. According to his research, it employed doctors who had been struck off the list for various misdemeanours. HMA was closed down after an inquiry in 1981, but Galster claims its plasma-collection unit continued to work right up until Clinton moved to the White House in 1991. Of course, records are scarce. Clinton has taken all his personal papers to the White House and the commission that first fingered the HMA lost all its records in a fire in 1990. Even if the facts still have to be investigated fully, Blood Trail is well worth reading purely as a thriller. The story is fast paced, the characters well defined and the action, often drawn from Galster's own experiences is explosive. Add all this to the medical scandal, which no feeling human being can ignore, and the result is compulsive reading.
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