Infected Blood Scandal worsened by NHS & Government Cover-Up

A report has concluded that the UK infected blood scandal was not an accident and was a “subtle, pervasive and chilling” cover-up by the NHS and the government.

Sir Brian Langstaff, who chaired the investigation, said the mess could “largely, though not entirely, have been avoided” but successive governments and others in authority “did not put patient safety first”.

More than 30,000 people in the UK were infected with contaminated blood from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

This was either from receiving transfusions during surgery, or through products created using blood plasma and imported from the US to treat haemophiliacs.

Around 3,000 have died as a result of this.

The report found that patients were lied to about the risks and, in some cases, infected during research carried out without their consent, or, in the case of children, that of their parents.

There were also delays in informing patients of their infections, taking years in some cases.

Langstaff said the hepatitis risks posed by blood transfusions or the use of plasma were known before the NHS’ inception in 1948, while the importation of factor VIII products should never have been licensed in 1973.

He said the treatment failures were heightened by denial and obfuscation.

This included the “misleading” often-repeated statement that there was “no conclusive proof” that Aids could be transmitted by transfusion of blood and blood products when the HIV epidemic emerged in the 1980s and, later, the deliberate destruction of official documents.

Langstaff condemned a culture in which “financial and reputational considerations predominated”, with the present government also criticised for failing to fully implement compensation recommendations.

He wrote: “Standing back and viewing the response of the NHS and of government, the answer to the question ‘was there a cover-up?’ is that there has been.

“Not in the sense of a handful of people plotting in an orchestrated conspiracy to mislead, but in a way that was more subtle, more pervasive and more chilling in its implications.

“To save face and to save expense, there has been a hiding of much of the truth.

“Over decades successive governments repeated lines to take that were inaccurate, defensive and misleading.

“Its persistent refusal to hold a public inquiry, coupled with a defensive mindset that refused to countenance that wrong had been done, left people without answers, and without justice.

“This has also meant that many people who are chronically ill have felt obliged to devote their time and their energies to investigating and campaigning, often at great personal cost.”

Langstaff found that while hepatitis C was not formally identified until 1988, the risk it posed was apparent from at least the mid-1970s.

With Aids, the report says that it was apparent by mid-1982 to “some clinicians and some within government” that whatever was causing it might be transmissible by blood and blood products.

Despite this, there were failures to ensure thorough donor selection and screening, with the continued collection of blood from prisons, screening delays and false reassurances provided to patients.

In July 1983, a decision was taken not to suspend the continued importation of commercially produced blood products.

Langstaff said: “The evidence before the inquiry overwhelmingly establishes that people with bleeding disorders were not properly advised of the risks of hepatitis or Aids.

“They had the right to know that factor concentrates might infect them with a serious or fatal disease for which there was no treatment.

“Parents had the right to know what such treatments might infect their children.”

“In practice, either they were given no information at all about such risks, or they were falsely reassured that the treatments were safe.”

He said it was time for national recognition of the disaster and for the government to pay proper compensation “to all those who have been wronged”.

Paying tribute to those infected and affected, he said they had “told powerful stories of pain, sickness and loss, of lives damaged and destroyed, unrecognisable from before their infection and unrecognisable from all their hopes and dreams for their lives”.