2026-08-26 from macleans.ca

I've always been a bleeder. My family has a long history of hemophilia, a hereditary disorder that limits one's ability to clot. There were limited treatments available when I was a young, frequently bruised kid in the early '60s, but by my teens, plasma transfusions had arrived, along with concentrates that could be self-administered at home. Doctors told me I could expect to lead a full life.

By the '80s, Canada's blood system, then overseen by the Canadian Red Cross, had become contaminated with hepatitis C and HIV due to insufficient screening. (It also used imported plasma from American inmates, a population at high risk of infection.) Health leaders nonetheless advised doctors and hemophiliacs that contracting hep C was a reasonable risk to take to receive treatment. I was diagnosed with the virus in 1990, and obviously lived, but it killed two of my uncles, also hemophiliacs, in subsequent years. 

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