From USA Today

Way to immediately cover your asses, VA.

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Which is where they're wrong.

Viral diseases can, and have been, identified by unique dna prints. It's not just CSI, folks!

It's actually by mutation, but ...sorta. They're right in that you cannot 'prove' they got it from that source. You can, however, show by overwhelming evidence that any other way is beyond unlikely.

But asshattery like theirs pulls what I like to call the unicorn defense. Simply because it can never be 100% proof positive...YOU CAN'T PROVE IT NYAH NYAH, when common sense and evidence dictate otherwise.

Besides the oodles of cash they'll walk away with, I hope there's criminal consequences for those fucks.

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Oh and my 'sorta' is because it's been difficult to prove HIV by source. Unless there's new forensics there...which there might be (there's been a lot of new shit in the last year I'm not completely up on). You can show a commonality factor due to similar mutation, since HIV mutates. So it's sorta like going back on the tree and saying these 2 people have similar mutation points here so it's likely it came from the same source at roughly this time.

Which isn't nearly as definitive as DNA, though it's pretty good. Again...there could be something new now that makes it even better that I just don't know. I'll probably read up on it this week.

As to hepatitis, I haven't seen any science on linking it for criminal cases, so no idea how they do that. THAT might be a lot more definitive. But I'll read up on it because I love this shit.

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My dad has been getting care from the VA for a while. He rec'd a letter in the mail a couple years ago informing him of this possibility. He was tested at a non-VA clinic and was clean. The VA did, at least in his case, admit to a mistake and did everything that they could to be upfront and forthright where a mistake *could* have been made. The problem the VA had isn't that they were just cutting people without cleaning the equipment or being reckless, they found out that the process that they had been using for sterilization of medical equipment was not 100% effective so they sent letters to everyone that had rec'd treatment during that time indicating that there was a potential risk for blood-borne diseases to be transmitted. They paid for an independent clinic to do the test and luckily my dad was clean.

I am not going to say that the VA is totally blameless on this, however from my family's experience they did not try to just push this away.

Whats the percent of people that have HIV in the entire population? Compare that to the percent of vets that might have been exposed that test positive. Statistically speaking some of them should have gotten it from outside sources as well.