The Book Prize Index

Blood Farm: The Explosive Big Pharma Scandal that Altered the AIDS Crisis

Cara McGoogan

"A stunning investigation." — Publishers Weekly How a miracle treatment turned deadly and changed the course of the AIDS crisis. By the mid 1980s, AIDS hysteria was so rampant that a fearful and prejudiced public ignored stories of gay men falling ill with lesions and mouth ulcers. President Reagan avoided mentioning the disease entirely. Then, as chronicled in Blood Farm, a new HIV-positive population emerged, one that included kids like Ken Dixon, Brad Cross, and Ryan White who had been infected as young as ten years old. But how? Unbeknownst to doctors and patients, pharmaceutical companies like Bayer, Baxter, and Armour collected plasma on skid row, in night clubs, and in some of America's most notorious prisons to make Factor VIII, a new miracle treatment for hemophilia.

Medicine & Public HealthMedicine & Public Health · medium confidenceMedicine & Public Health81 signalsLlm Classifier: Medicine & Public Health -> Medicine & Public HealthKeyword Classifier: American History -> American HistoryKeyword Classifier: Gender & Sexuality -> Gender & SexualityDisease, Epidemics & DrugsDrugs, Addiction & TreatmentLGBTQ History & LifeFood, Agriculture & Land

Award History

0 wins · 1 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize2024FinalistSecondary source
View all award history (1)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    • Ken Dixon72%
    Show lower-confidence suggestions

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • Brad Cross62%
    • Ryan White68%

  2. 02 Central places

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • America's most notorious prisons38%

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    No argument inferred with sufficient confidence.

    This suggestion did not meet the normal display threshold and is more likely to be wrong.

    Pharmaceutical companies collected plasma without patients’ knowledge, producing Factor VIII that exposed children with hemophilia to HIV and thereby altered the AIDS crisis’s course.

    Model confidence 49%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    28 / 100 academic

    Serious trade

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 60%.