Ryan White - Early Life and Illness

Early Life and Illness

Ryan White was born at St. Joseph Memorial Hospital in Kokomo, Indiana, to Jeanne Elaine Hale and Hubert Wayne White. He was circumcised and the bleeding would not stop. When he was three days old, doctors diagnosed him with severe Hemophilia A, a hereditary blood coagulation disorder associated with the X chromosome, which causes even minor injuries to result in severe bleeding. For treatment, he received weekly transfusions of Factor VIII, a blood product created from pooled plasma of non-hemophiliacs, an increasingly common treatment for hemophiliacs at the time.

Healthy for most of his childhood, he became extremely ill with pneumonia in December 1984. On December 17, 1984, during a partial-lung removal procedure, White was diagnosed with AIDS. The scientific community knew little about AIDS at the time: scientists had only realized earlier that year that HTLV-III, now called HIV, was the cause of AIDS. White had apparently received a contaminated treatment of Factor VIII that was infected with HTLV-III, although exactly when he was infected remains unknown to this day. At that time, because the retrovirus had only been recently identified as the AIDS virus, much of the pooled factor VIII concentrate supply in hospitals was tainted because doctors did not know how to test for the disease, and donors often did not know they were infected or that blood was a factor in the transmission of the virus. Among hemophiliacs treated with blood-clotting factors between 1979 and 1984, nearly 90% became infected with HIV. At the time of his diagnosis, his T-cell count had dropped to 25 (a healthy individual without HIV will have around 500-1200). Doctors predicted White had only six months to live.

After the diagnosis, White was too ill to return to school, but by early 1985 he began to feel better. His mother asked if he could return to school, but was told by school officials that he could not. On June 30, 1985, a formal request to permit re-admittance to school was denied by Western School Corporation superintendent James O. Smith, sparking a legal battle that lasted for eight months.