The annual meeting of the American Association of Blood Banks in San Francisco last week was a long-awaited opportunity for warm handshakes and upbeat talk. During the past 18 months, health professionals have meticulously tested every pint of blood in the nation's reserves for the AIDS virus. The hugely successful effort, which costs more than $50 million annually, has rendered negligible a once ominous threat to recipients of blood transfusions. But the convention proceedings got a jolt when Dr. Luc Montagnier of Paris' Pasteur Institute informed the assembly that an AIDS virus called LAV-II, whose presence in two West Africans was...
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