Thread by @Paracelsus1092

Now seems a good time to talk about the Vampire of the Carribbean and how a rogue Haitian company was selling HIV tainted blood to American hospitals.

This is the tale of Hemo-Caribbean and its creator Luckner Cambronne, right hand man to Papa Doc Duvalier and leader of the notorious paramilitary force, the Tonton Macoute.

Luckner Cambronne was born in 1929, the son of a poor Protestant
preacher. Starting out as a bank teller, he eventually found a job in the
company of François Duvalier (Papa Doc). Cambronne quickly rose to become chief extortionist for Papa Doc's regime.

Despite stealing huge sums from the ministries he held, and redirecting public infrastructure funds towards his own accounts, Cambronne also bullied, extorted and intimidated local businessmen. They would 'donate' to the regime, those who failed often disappeared.

Cambronne eventually headed up Duvalier's personal militia, the Tonton Macoute. Named after a voodoo monster who kidnaps children, the Macoute beat, raped, stoned, burnt, extorted and rampaged across Haiti, silencing all opposition.

Cambronne identified a number of business opportunities as leader of the Macoute. Taxi companies, travel and divorce companies and selling dead and murdered bodies to US medical schools. In the early 1970's he started Hemo-Caribbean with Joseph Gorinstein, a Miami businessman.

Hemo-Caribbean ran out of Port-au-Prince. Initially a two-story building with capacity for 350 plasma donors, overseen by an Austrian biochemist. By 1972 the company was harvesting 6000 litres of plasma a month.

The New York Times ran an investigative report, describing how impoverished Haitians were being farmed for their plasma and paid very little.

A local doctor commented: ‘The plasma cows are
rather tired, but they don’t have a job anyway.’

An author estimated
that around 6,000 Haitians sold their plasma to Hemo-
Caribbean. Gorinstein claimed
that in late 1972 Hemo-Caribbean was paying donors an average of
$70,000 each month: at $4 per donation, this corresponds to 700
different donors each day.

After Papa Doc's death, his son Baby Doc took over rule of Haiti. Cambronne was in a threatening position and was ousted. By the end of 1972 Hemo-Caribbean was forcibly closed down.

Disastrously, Hemo-Caribbean opened at exactly the time the new HIV-B strain had entered Haiti. Noone knew to look or screen for it, and since plasma donors were reinfused with their own red blood cells, poor hygeine compounded with rampant infection provided the perfect cover.

Follow up surveys on HIV patients in Haiti neglected to ask about plasma donation to Hemo-Caribbean, neither did an academic review paper looking at blood banks in Haiti. The company slipped under the radar

The frozen plasma was exported on Air Haiti, Cambronne’s company, and sold to four American enterprises: Armour Pharmaceutical, Cutter Laboratories, Dade Reagents and Dow Chemical, as well as to clients in Germany and Sweden.

Nobody knows how many people became infected with HIV through these sales. Although some may have been used to make albumin and immunoglobulins, which deactives the virus, for haemophiliacs, the factor VIII treatment meant plasma was pooled with up to 25k other donations.

Cambronne died quietly in Miami in 2006, a far too pleasant a death for a man who disappeared countless people, tortured and intimidated his way into power and helped spread a deadly virus around the world.

I'll leave you with one of his famous and chilling sayings:

"A good Duvalierist is prepared to kill
his own children for Duvalier, and also expects his children to kill their
parents for him"