Federal Court permits contaminated-blood litigation to proceed

In ongoing legal proceedings involving people infected with HIV through contaminated blood products, on 3 June 2004 Campbell J of the Federal Court permitted the plaintiffs to refile an amended statement of claim, thus allowing the litigation to proceed. As reported in a previous issue of the Review, the court had struck out their original statement of claim, ruling (among other things) that it disclosed no reasonable cause of action and constituted an abuse of process.