Britain is learning the full extent of the country's worst-ever medical scandal. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, approximately 30,000 people became infected with Hepatitis C, HIV, and other diseases from contaminated blood products or blood transfusions. This was no accident. The publication of a report from a public inquiry, led by the retired judge Sir Brian Langstaff, has found a ‘catalogue of failures' among civil servants, politicians, and doctors within the National Health Service (NHS). More than 3,000 people have died.
How did this happen? In the 1960s, scientists developed a medication that transformed the lives of those with hemophilia. By combining frozen blood and subjecting it to fractionation, an essential blood-clotting protein called Factor VIII could be concentrated and easily distilled into bottles, reducing hemophiliacs' risk of death from bleeding. To many, it seemed like a miracle drug. Though the United Kingdom licensed the use of Factor VIII concentrate in 1973, the country was not self-sufficient and soon imported this blood product in sizeable quantities from the United States.
Here the troubles began. In the US, blood donors received payment as an incentive and were often incarcerated or unhoused people more likely to carry diseases such as hepatitis. Through imported blood products, British patients became infected with Hepatitis C and, later, HIV. Many people contracted these diseases from receiving blood transfusions after hospital procedures like giving birth.
'Hiding the truth'
Politicians and civil servants knew about this unfolding disaster. In 1980, the Department of Health and Social Security acknowledged in a note that blood donated from high-risk groups carried a higher chance of infection. Two years later, the consultant adviser to the Chief Medical Officer informed civil servants that HIV might spread through donated blood.
Some experts pleaded with the government to end blood imports from the US. Time and again, nothing was done. Instead, Conservative and Labour governments deployed "inaccurate, misleading and defensive lines" when challenged about the crisis. Langstaff even observes that files related to the scandal were "deliberately destroyed," part of a mass exercise in "hiding the truth."
Shockingly, a number of doctors used this crisis as an opportunity for experimentation. At Treloar School in Hampshire – a specialist institution designed to help children with hemophilia – doctors working for the NHS gave schoolchildren high-risk commercial blood products and monitored their progress. It seems that none of the pupils or their parents consented to this experimentation. Out of 122 pupils with hemophilia who attended Treloar School between 1970 and 1987, only 30 survive.
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