Transmission of HIV through Blood Products in Japan:
Public Administration, Scientific Researchers and Courts

Hitoshi Sakamoto
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
University of Minnesota

August 2001

Abstract

Critical interactions of science and society through government are examined in the case of AIDS epidemic of the early 1980s among people with hemophilia and transfusions. This issue is approaching another very important turning point this year in 2001. In Japan, a court makes final judges on two people who are accused of criminal activities. In fact, one of them, a research doctor, has been acquitted. The primary reason is scientific uncertainties at the time. The present study explores similar criminal cases in France after which most of the accused were convicted. The present study finds that the rulings between France and Japan are in conflict. Scientific certainties were one of the reasons for the French convictions, but the Japanese court stated scientific uncertainties to be a reason for not convicting the doctor. There are differences in institutional arrangements, power politics and legal cultures in play. The Japanese administrative and legal systems are criticized on the basis of relativistic ethical principles, which essentially ruined an appropriate assessment of development of scientific understanding of AIDS in Japan. Also, the present study sees the “tragedy” as an example of scientific progress under public pressure that was observed in interactions of forefront researchers in France and in the U.S.. Notions such as scientific “progress” and “consensus” are explored to explain the disagreement between the court rulings and public-to-science interface.

Background:

I wrote this for a Environmental and Resource Economics course when I was a graduate student at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. The article found the IAEA estimate of 82 years of uranium resource was based on the assumption of constant reactor capacity. If the global capacity continues to increase, the resource will be depleted in less than 82 years. It is reasonable, however, to think that the resource will last longer than 82 years, even with constant capacity, because of future discovery of resources. What was more important in the study was that reprocessed fuels would be much more expensive than fuels using uranium from the mines. The bottleneck for this is not the few number of reprocessing plants but the lack of technology to actually reprocess the hot fuel rods from the reactor.