The infection of 4,700 haemophiliacs with HIV and hepatitis C during the 1970s and 1980s and the subsequent death of 2,000 of these patients has long been sold to the public by successive governments as an ‘unavoidable accident’.
Haemophilia is an inherited bleeding disorder where the body lacks the necessary clotting factor and patients were therefore reliant on the blood of strangers to treat this condition. The female is the carrier of the haemophilia gene and this is passed down the male line, though there are rare cases of female “bleeders”.
At the time this catastrophe occurred, a doctor’s word was seldom questioned and a paternalistic attitude was the rule of the day. Patients trusted the medical profession to abide by the Hippocratic oath of “first do no harm”. Sadly this was not the case.
Haemophiliacs discovered that far from receiving blood from volunteer donors in the UK from a system based on altruism, they were actually being injected with plasma pooled from up to 60,000 paid donors based in US prisons or homeless alcoholics and drug-users surviving on skid row.
The British government repeatedly prioritised profit before safety and failed to invest in self-sufficiency by developing the infrastructure to collect blood, manufacture treatment products and supply the needs of the UK. National faciIities at Bio-Products Laboratory fell into such disrepair that one 1979 report concluded: “If BPL were a private concern it would be closed down immediately on the grounds of safety.”
However it was only some years later, when sick and dying haemophiliacs and their families turned detective, accessing and digesting the contents of their medical records, initiating legal cases and campaigning for the Department of Health (DOH) to give an honest account of how they came to be infected, that patients realised how badly they had been betrayed.
In a sense the attitude and behaviour expressed towards the haemophilia community was a microcosm of how society at large was changing. The focus of the DOH became more and more on money and less on the wellbeing of patients in a world where increasing globalisation encouraged exploitation of those less fortunate and almost anything could be turned into a commodity, including blood.
Doctors went with the flow, happy to be on the payroll of multi-national pharmaceutical companies and ignoring any conflict of interest. Documents acquired by health activists showed that the DOH and the majority of haematologists turned a blind eye to warnings from experts in the early 1970s not to import plasma from America. They ignored warnings from experts again in 1983 to take this treatment off the shelves when Aids emerged in the US.
Much of the US plasma came from Arkansas State Penitentiary, a prison so notorious for human rights abuses that the real life story of the new prison warden, Thomas Murton, and his attempts to deal with cruelty, corruption and southern state politics were turned into a Hollywood film. Haemophiliacs’ court cases in America detailed repeated safety violations which included the re-use of collection equipment (one prisoner is on record describing how he re-sharpened needles with sandpaper for the plasma programme).
Records of inmates that were known drug users glowing yellow with hepatitis were falsified, with names taken at random from a local telephone directory, and prisoners were injected with live viruses as part of a medical experimentation programme against the Nuremberg code.
To hide their complicity, successive British governments have repeatedly refused a full and open public inquiry. Positive test results were withheld from patients, key documents shredded and the public deceived by issuing false statements in the House of Commons despite a haemophiliac winning a judicial review in 2010 calling the Department of Health’s reasoning “flawed”.
No proper apology has ever been given.
Carol Ann Grayson is director of co-ordination for Asia Despatch and an independent researcher/cam-paigner on global health and human rights, awarded the ESRC Michael Young Prize in 2009.
- The Irish Times reported last year that the Irish State has paid €1bn in compensation to the families of those affected by Hepatitis C and HIV in Ireland in the same case of getting contaminated blood from the United States. Readers can find more about this case by researching the Lindsay Tribunal. Glór Moslamach gives special thanks to our guest writer, who lost her husband and brother in law in this disaster.
