Overview

"Shortlisted for the Lukas Book Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by The Financial Times ""A stunning investigation.""----Publishers Weekly How a miracle treatment turned deadly and changed the course of the AIDS crisis. By the mid 1980s, AIDS hysteria was so rampant that a fearful and prejudiced public ignored stories of gay men falling ill with lesions and mouth ulcers. President Reagan avoided mentioning the disease entirely. Then, as chronicled in Blood Farm, a new HIV-positive population emerged, one that included kids like Ken Dixon, Brad Cross, and Ryan White who had been infected as young as ten years old. But how? Unbeknownst to doctors and patients, pharmaceutical companies like Bayer, Baxter, and Armour collected plasma on skid row, in night clubs, and in some of America's most notorious prisons to make Factor VIII, a new miracle treatment for hemophilia. Companies knew these practices put patients at high risk of HIV, but miracles are a lucrative business, so they knowingly sold an infected product and effectively played Russian Roulette with hemophiliacs' lives. The results were catastrophic. In America, some 8,000 people with hemophilia contracted HIV; only 700 are alive today. Award-winning journalist Cara McGoogan daringly exposes an expansive map of corporate greed and negligence that led to one of the biggest overlooked medical scandals in history. Alongside her we meet survivors turned activists, determined small town lawyers, and fearless reporters desperate for justice. Their fight for retribution created a critical inflection point in the AIDS crisis: stigmas shifted, settlements were awarded, and, later, President George H.W. Bush signed into law the largest federal program on HIV. In shocking, riveting detail, Blood Farm uncovers how a miracle treatment became a deadly poison and forever changed our understanding of AIDS."

Full Product Details

9781635768886

Table of Contents

Reviews

An important and mostly unknown story of pharmaceutical malfeasance and greed with devastating and lethal consequences. Cara McGoogan is a gifted reporter and writer who has already made great progress in unravelling this mystery. She is the ideal journalist to uncover the sweeping depth of this explosive scandal. ----Gerald Posner, Pulitzer Prize Finalist and author of Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America Cara McGoogan is an indefatigable detective and a born storyteller. --Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, staff writer at The New Yorker and former dean of Columbia Journalism No one is better placed than her to tell this harrowing, urgent story with the scope and depth of a book. With [McGoogan's] trademark empathy, clarity and dogged persistence, The Poison Line promises to be essential reading. --Jonathan Freedland, Guardian columnist and author of The Escape Artist

Author Information

"Cara McGoogan is the award-winning writer and host of the Telegraph's documentary podcast. BED OF LIES, which investigates major scandals people should know more about. In recognition of her reporting, Cara was recently awarded the 2022 Stern-Bryan Fellowship at the Washington Post. Cara is the Telegraph's first Narrative Audio Journalist and is developing ideas for her third investigative podcast series. She recently made a documentary for BBC Radio 4 about police misogyny called Bad Apples, which was previewed across Britain's newspapers as a ""pick of the week."" Cara has a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University. She resides in London, UK."

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available