College fined over burning of blood packets by employee

Blood packets used by medical students at Cork Institute of Technology were brought home by a staff member and burned in a barrel, only to be dragged by a dog on to the front lawn of a house - sparking an investigation that resulted in the institute being convicted and fined €2,000 today.

The eleven packets originally came from the Irish Blood Transfusion Service and were used at CIT for work with medical students. A CIT employee decided to take home the empty packets which had blood residues in them and burn them in a 45-gallon barrel outside his house in North Cork.