Barbara Gayle, Staff Reporter

The parents of 13-year-old Richard Facey, who contracted HIV in 1997 during a blood transfusion, have lost their legal battle to get compensation from the Government.

Supreme Court Judge Horace Marsh threw out the negligence suit in which the parents were seeking $29 million in damages.

Facey, who died this year, was a haemophiliac. He contracted HIV through a blood transfusion while he was a patient at the Bustamante Hospital for Children.The hospital, the Blood Bank and the Ministry of Health were the defendants, but the judge found they were not negligent.

The judge, in dismissing the case last week Friday, held that the procedures of blood collecting and testing at the National Blood Transfusion Service, during the relevant period, 1995 to 1997, accorded with the standards of a responsible body of medical opinion.Government lawyers Symone Mayhew and Nicola Brown argued that the proper medicinal procedures were followed when Facey received blood from the Blood Bank in 1997.

They argued that no other person was infected through blood transfusions during the period Facey received blood.

Negligence suit

The negligence suit alleged was that there was, among other things, a failure to test or properly test for the HIV virus in the blood transfused, failure to have a proper system in the testing of blood, and failure to store tested blood so as to prevent HIV-infected blood from being transfused to Richard Facey.

The judge, after reviewing the evidence, concluded that the evidence of the defendants was uncontroverted. The judge found that the process employed at the National Blood Transfusion Service for screening prospective blood donors was more than adequate.

Attorney-at-law Antonnette Haughton-Cardenas represented the claimants.