Between World War II and the outbreak of AIDS in the early 1980s, Americans with hemophilia enjoyed what Elaine DePrince calls a "golden moment." Once life-threatening "bleeds" could be controlled with injections of "clotting factors" manufactured from blood plasma. Hemophiliacs' life expectancy soared. Their range of activity, at work and play, broadened.

Things weren't perfect. For example, a person who used clotting factors had almost a 100% chance of catching hepatitis. Pharmaceutical companies (Alpha, Armour, Baxter and Bayer, and their subsidiaries) made the stuff from plasma "pooled" from tens of thousands of donors, including Haitians, prison inmates and residents of drug-ridden slums. Just one infected donor could contaminate a whole batch of clotting factor with virus.

Couldn't a hemophiliac who caught hepatitis from impure blood products sue the manufacturer? Well, no. Legislatures in 47 states--California was the first, in 1955--quietly adopted "blood-shield laws" that exempted makers of blood products from the "strict product liability" that applies to makers of such things as automobiles and toys. Under these laws, manufacturers could sue their sources of tainted plasma, but patients couldn't sue the manufacturers.

The doctors who treated hemophiliacs, and their own advocacy group, the National Hemophilia Foundation, advised them that the benefits of clotting factors outweighed the risks, DePrince says--even after it became known that AIDS could be transmitted by blood and blood products.

The result: "By 1988, more than half the hemophiliacs in the United States were infected with HIV. By 1994, the median life span of a hemophiliac was back to what it had been in 1966."

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In plain terms, more than 10,000 people were condemned to death by the products they had counted on to help them live. In the terms that matter most to DePrince, a New Jersey teacher-activist, clotting factors contaminated with HIV killed two of her five sons--Cubby at 11 and Mike at 15. A third son, Teddy, also has HIV but his infection has been been stabilized.

"I wanted to die after the deaths of my sons," says DePrince, who instead threw herself into lobbying the New Jersey legislature to extend the statute of limitations on suits seeking compensation for such deaths. "I realized that living with anger is less painful than living with grief."