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Comment by digitalzombie | Hacker News Reader

> In the mid-1980s, just as the Aids crisis peaked and US scientists discovered the virus that caused the disease was borne by blood, American drug companies knowingly sold HIV-tainted blood products in Asia.

It wasn't just an American company, there were actually two companies, Bayer (German) and Baxter (American). Baxter have a history of very shady things, I'm surprised they're around. I wish the author cite the quote or more clear on that part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baxter_International#1996_Japa...

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Not just Asia, Canada also. Bill Clinton approved harvesting blood from HIV-infected prisoners in Arkansas and selling it to the Canadians.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/arkansas-bloodsucker...

other fun bits:

"Cryosan had a shady reputation in the medical industry. It had been nabbed importing blood taken from Russian cadavers and relabeling it as though it was from Swedish volunteers."

and Arkansas way of screening for HIV:

"Pine Bluffs president Jimmy Lord dismissed such concerns and suggested that AIDs was not a problem in Arkansas. “If anyone got caught in a homosexual act,” Lords said, “we took them off the roster.”"

The funny thing with Bayer recently purchasing Monsanto is wondering which name elicits the least shady history

Monsanto ? Bayer's medical experiments on people in concentration camps is hard to top.

Plus:

> In 1895, the German drug company Bayer marketed diacetylmorphine as an over-the-counter drug under the trademark name Heroin.[69] It was developed chiefly as a morphine substitute for cough suppressants that did not have morphine's addictive side-effects. Morphine at the time was a popular recreational drug, and Bayer wished to find a similar but non-addictive substitute to market. However, contrary to Bayer's advertising as a "non-addictive morphine substitute," heroin would soon have one of the highest rates of addiction among its users.[70]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin#History

I'd tend to agree, but yet they went with Bayer. I guess Bayer's history is a little more buried while Monsanto's flagship product is currently getting sued to oblivion.

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