LONDON – British authorities and the country’s public health service knowingly exposed tens of thousands of patients to deadly infections through contaminated blood and blood products, and hid the truth about the disaster for decades, an inquiry into the scandal revealed on Monday. infected blood in the UK.
An estimated 3,000 people in the UK died and many more were left with lifelong illnesses after receiving blood or blood products contaminated with HIV or hepatitis between the 1970s and early 1990s.
The scandal is widely seen as the deadliest disaster in the history of Britain’s state-run National Health Service since its creation in 1948.
Former judge Brian Langstaff, who chaired the inquiry, criticized successive governments and medical professionals for “a catalog of failures” and a refusal to admit responsibility to save face and expenses. He found that deliberate attempts were made to hide the scandal and that there was evidence that government officials destroyed documents.
“This disaster was not an accident. The infections happened because the authorities – the doctors, the blood services and successive governments – did not put patient safety first,” he said. “The authorities’ response served to worsen people’s suffering.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak apologized to the victims and said the publication of the report marked “a day of shame for the British state”.
Activists have fought for decades to bring official failings to light and secure government compensation. The inquiry was finally approved in 2017 and over the past four years has analyzed evidence from more than 5,000 witnesses and more than 100,000 documents.
Many of those affected were people with hemophilia, a condition that affects the blood’s ability to clot. In the 1970s, patients received a new treatment that the United Kingdom imported from the United States. Some of the plasma used to make the blood products was allocated to high-risk donors, including inmates, who were paid to donate blood samples.
Because the treatment’s manufacturers mixed plasma from thousands of donations, one infected donor would compromise the entire batch.
The report states that about 1,250 people with bleeding disorders, including 380 children, were infected with HIV-contaminated blood products. Three-quarters of them died. Up to 5,000 other people who received blood products developed chronic hepatitis C, a type of liver infection.
Meanwhile, about 26,800 other people also became infected with hepatitis C after receiving blood transfusions, often administered in hospitals after childbirth, surgery or an accident, the report said.
“I’m sorry,” Sunak told a packed and silent House of Commons. “Today’s report shows a decades-long moral failure at the heart of our national life. From the National Health Service to the civil service, to ministers in successive governments, at every level, the people and institutions in which we place our trust have failed in the most distressing and devastating ways.”
He promised to “right this historic wrong” and said details of a compensation package, expected to total 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion), would be announced on Tuesday.
The report states that many of the deaths and illnesses could have been prevented if the government had taken steps to address the risks associated with blood transfusions or the use of blood products. Since the 1940s and early 1980s, it has been known that hepatitis and the cause of AIDS, respectively, could be transmitted in this way, the inquiry said.
Langstaff said that unlike a long list of developed countries, UK authorities had failed to ensure rigorous selection of blood donors and screening of blood products. At a school attended by children with hemophilia, public health officials gave the children “multiple and more risky” treatments as part of the investigation, the report said.
He added that over the years authorities had “increased the agony by refusing to accept that anything wrong had been done” by falsely telling patients that they had received the best treatment available and that blood tests had been introduced into the first opportunity. infected, authorities were slow to inform them about what happened.
Langstaff said that while each failure on its own is serious, when taken “together they are a calamity.”
Andy Evans, of campaign group Tainted Blood, told reporters that he and others “felt like we were shouting into the wind for the last 40 years”.
“We’ve been gaslit for generations. Today’s report puts an end to that. He also looks to the future and says this cannot continue,” he said.
Diana Johnson, a lawmaker who has long campaigned for victims, said she hopes those responsible for the disaster will face justice – including prosecution – although investigations have taken so long that some key players may have since died.
“There has to be accountability for the actions that were taken, even if it was 30, 40, 50 years ago,” she said.
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Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
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