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Charlotte-based company accused of wrongly diagnosing plasma donors with HIV

An attorney who has filed suit against Octapharma Plasma Incorporated said he's heard from 10 people with similar stories and believes false-positive testing is happening in North Carolina.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A growing number of people in other places are accusing a Charlotte-based company of incorrectly dropping an incorrect medical bombshell. 

An attorney who's filed suit against Octapharma Plasma Incorporated told us he's heard from 10 plasma donors with similar stories, accusing the company, headquartered in Charlotte, of giving them fear-inducing news that they were HIV positive.

"Many similar victims have had initial thoughts of hopelessness and despair after being falsely told they tested positive for HIV by Octapharma, who the victims have mistakenly assumed to be 'the experts' who were conducting accurate tests and providing accurate information to them," Dallas-based attorney Brad Kizzia said. "We have heard from 10 substantially similar victims."

Derrick Anderson is one of those people. The longtime plasma donor said he stopped visiting an Octapharma plasma donation center in Texas after he received the devastating news. He said it prompted him to contemplate suicide.

"She brought me into a room, handed me a little paper and said, 'You have HIV,'" he said. "I'm just like, where's the closest Walmart so I can go drink bleach. That was my first thought."

Banned from donating plasma moving forward, Anderson said he decided to visit his doctor and that's when he learned he's actually HIV negative.

"You can't keep doing this to people," he said.

Long before his reported misdiagnosis, Michael Sutton accused Octapharma of the same thing at its Dallas location. He has a pending lawsuit against the company.

"They could have caused me to go home and say, 'Well, they're the professionals. That's the end of it,' and end my life," Sutton said.

His attorney believes the false-positive testing is happening in North Carolina.

"Octapharma's Director of Quality Control (whose office is in North Carolina) testified that samples from all plasma collections are sent to their main facility there for testing, so presumably all of the false-positive testing occurred at the North Carolina facility," Kizzia said.

Not only is the company headquartered in Charlotte, but there are also three Octapharma Plasma donation centers here. While the accusations from other parts of the country caught Charlotte donors off-guard, they said they have full faith in the company.

"That's kind of bad, but down here it's good quality service," donor Daniel Dixon said. "I trust them."

"I'm not concerned about that," Charles Williams said. "The people there are really nice. They're concerned. They pay attention to what's going on."

We've reached out to Octapharma multiples times for comment over the last week, but have yet to receive an official response.

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