World Localization Day(世界ローカリゼーションの日）のイベントに、
妻 堤未果と出席してコメントしました。
Hello everyone. My name is Ryuhei Kawada and I’m a member of the House of Councillors in Japan.
I’m very happy to meet all of you today.
I bet all of you here have an interest in my country, Japan.
How many of you know about the lawsuit concerning HIV infection among hemophiliacs, which had a huge impact on the history of health care in Japan?
That was in 1986, and when the AIDS virus arrived on our shores, the entire country panicked and became terrified of the disease. The media issued exaggerated reports about how patient zero was a gay man who’d contracted it sexually in the United States, and false information spread such as “if you get infected, you’re definitely going to die” and “just touching the skin of an infected person is enough to spread the disease” filtered around, causing everyone in the country to tremble in fear, especially the parents of teenagers.
In the middle of all this, one day my mom told me while we were having lunch, “I have to inform you that you’ve been infected with HIV.”
I was only 10 years old.
Everything faded to black before my eyes. I was still in grade school, so how could I be infected with HIV?
I was born with hemophilia, an incurable disease where the body has difficulty forming blood clots to stop bleeding, and was receiving injections of blood products as treatment. One or more of these were unheated and contaminated with HIV. Even though there were reports of HIV contamination in unheated blood products, Japanese pharmaceutical companies importing these products didn’t want to lose market share to American heated formulations. And so together with the Japanese government, these companies kept the reports secret and continued selling these products. The American pharmaceutical companies were also aware of the risks, but still continued to export their stock.
These two factors led to my infection with HIV.