The State : AIDS Death Laid to Blood

An 80-year-old San Francisco woman died of AIDS contracted from a blood transfusion, and one of her sons charged that the family learned the cause of death only after morticians refused to embalm her body. Anne Asaro, matriarch of a large Bay Area family, died last week. She had received the tainted blood last spring, when she received a transfusion from the city’s Irwin Blood Bank, her family said. Authorities said she was the 17th San Franciscan to die of the disease and the ninth to contract acquired immune deficiency syndrome after getting blood from the same blood bank. Officials there said tests last September were not definitive enough to warrant telling the woman that she might have the disease. John Asaro, one of the victim’s sons, said embalmers refused to prepare her body for a traditional Catholic open casket funeral, and it was only then that he was told that AIDS brought on the pneumonia that took her life.