In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
Dear questioner! Thank you very much for your good question that reflects deep insight and true search for knowledge. May Allah increase you in knowledge and grant you success in this world and in the afterlife.
In the first place, it is well known that AIDS can be transmitted through transfusion of contaminated blood. Whether blood is imported or collected domestically, transfusing it without testing it for AIDS can infect many people.
One is held responsible for a wrong action when he has been a direct factor or a causative one or negligent in his action it. The punishment in each of these cases depends on to what extent the doer has been aware of the risk involved in committing such an action and his intention on doing it. Accordingly, the responsible for giving a patient AIDS-contaminated blood falls on the one who does so intentionally and on the one who neglects his duty to examine the blood before transfusing it.
Elaborating on this issue, the eminent Muslim scholar Sheikh Mustafa Az-Zarqa (may Allah have mercy upon him) said:
"Infecting a patient with AIDS during blood transfusion is a new kind of negligence that brings about harmful results; it is an untraditional question that has not been tackled by jurisprudents before. After considering and contemplating the question in hand, I reached some conclusions. Firstly, the doctor who has transmitted the blood is not to be held responsible for inflecting the patients with AIDS, for it is not he who imports the blood, nor is it his duty to examine the blood brought to the hospital to make sure if it contains diseases. According to the questioner, the doctor in this case is like a machine that transmits blood to patients.
Secondly, the administration of the hospital is a causative, not a direct, factor in such a case. It has not done so intentionally; it is negligent in not examining the blood that it imports to make sure it is uncontaminated before allowing doctors to transfuse it to patients. Negligence of such a kind is a causative, not a direct, factor in transferring the virus. If being a causative factor in causing someone harm is committing aggression against him, the hospital's transfusing contaminated blood to a patient who needs it is, no doubt, also a kind of committing aggression against him.
But it should be taken into consideration that the date of the accident of the case in hand is of a paramount importance. If it is verified that blood tests to detect AIDS were not yet known at the time when the operation performed on the family mentioned in the question (i.e., 1982, according to the hospital), the administration of the hospital is not to be considered negligent in that respect. The family's being infected with the virus then is to be considered Allah's decree and no human being is to be held responsible for it.
The point with regard to verifying whether blood tests to discover AIDS were in effect at the time the patients mentioned in the question received blood is to be referred to doctors experienced in that regard, that is, doctors who follow recent discoveries in the medical field. This is my point of view on that subject."
Almighty Allah knows best.
