None of the NHS scandals I have written about for decades matches the scale of tragedy and the callous deceit in the tainted blood affair

Published by The Daily Mail (21st May, 2024)

Colin Smith, a boy who had developed a bruise on his knee a few months after his birth, was the first case I wrote about.

This indicated that he had inherited haemophilia — the blood-clotting disorder known as the ‘royal disease’ after it had swept through Queen Victoria’s family.

Soon Colin was making regular trips to hospital for infusions of the revolutionary blood-clotting agent factor VIII, intended to ensure that he could live a normal life. Instead it killed him.

For this little boy was infected with HIV from a contaminated batch of factor VIII, made in the U.S. with blood from some of the world’s highest-risk donors, such as drug addicts and prostitutes.

After months of chronic chest infections, fevers and diarrhoea, Colin died in 1990 aged seven. His ravaged body weighed just 13lb (6kg).

This story, which I told in these pages 14 years ago, is incredibly sad. Yet almost 3,000 more Britons have died, often in a similar manner, while thousands more lives have been wrecked by debilitating and deadly diseases.

The infected blood scandal is the worst patient-healthcare scandal in the history of the NHS, exposing the darkest reality lurking beneath its deified facade.

Britain, of course, was not the only country affected. In the U.S. they branded it ‘the haemophilia holocaust’. In France it led to the prosecution of ministers and jailing of officials. In Canada and Japan it resulted in criminal charges and convictions.

But in our country, no one has been punished. Some heartless medics, shameless bureaucrats and spineless politicians responded to this massacre of the innocents by covering their tracks, destroying documents and rebuffing desperate pleas for help from sick and often impoverished citizens.

The state must now take ownership of its lethal misdeeds. Yesterday it was confirmed this betrayal was not just a patient-safety failure of grotesque proportions, but an avoidable tragedy which was followed by ‘downright deception’ of the public.

More than four decades after the first horror stories started to emerge, Sir Brian Langstaff’s damning report exposes in detail the shocking litany of official cover-up, deceit and incompetence.

‘This disaster was not an accident. People put their faith in doctors and in the Government to keep them safe, and their trust was betrayed,’ said Sir Brian.

For me, it is particularly poignant because, as a child, I had a blood-clotting disorder and spent time in hospital with boys with haemophilia. The odds dictate many of my fellow patients back then must now be dead.

None of the health scandals I have written about in many years of covering the NHS matches the scale of this tragedy, nor the level of callous deceit and failure, which led to more than 30,000 people being infected with HIV, hepatitis C and other deadly diseases between 1970 and 1991.

I was utterly shocked when I began to discover the lack of concern shown towards the people affected by it.

Take Colin, whose doctors did not mention to his parents the risks involved in the product they were giving him. Yet the inquiry revealed that the specialist treating him — a leading expert on haemophilia — was fully aware of the dangers.

Nor did doctors mention — until three years after his death — that in addition to HIV, Colin had been infected with hepatitis C. That was despite the risk that this disease, known as ‘the silent killer’ because it can take years for symptoms to emerge, could be easily passed to other members of his family if they came into contact with his blood.

In his final months, Colin’s parents had to use a sheepskin to lift their beloved boy, such was the pain tormenting his shrunken body. After his death, they were told to burn his mattress. No explanation, no counselling, no apology.

Sir Brian’s devastating report makes clear that it was ‘apparent’ by 1982 that diseases such as hepatitis and whatever was causing Aids could be spread by unscreened blood products. Yet doctors continued to give them to patients.

It also underlines that our country was fatally slow to respond to the unfolding catastrophe, pointing out that 23 other nations introduced life-saving screening before the UK did.

The result of this inquiry is a bittersweet victory for campaigners who have spent up to 40 years ‘shouting into the wind’. As one told me, any joy or relief is tempered by the sadness that so many friends have died during the long struggle for recognition and justice.

Joseph Peaty is one of few survivors among 120 pupils infected at Treloar, a special boarding school in Hampshire that catered for haemophiliacs and where boys were used as guinea pigs in secret trials to test blood products, despite those in charge knowing the risks of infection with deadly diseases.

More than 70 people who were pupils there have now died of Aids and hepatitis.

Joseph, who was himself infected with these diseases, told me how, now aged 58, he has lost the best years of his life fighting for compensation and justice. He added that this report comes too late for his parents, now in their 80s.

As he has told me previously, the number of deaths at Treloar alone should have sparked a public inquiry and prompted action many years ago. But instead the medical and political establishment buried the truth.

Campaigners often talked to me of an extra twist of cruelty: how, because haemophilia is an inherited condition, multiple family members were given tainted blood and failed so egregiously by the health service meant to help them. People such as Robert Mackie, a Scot, who saw three family members die, and Ade Goodyear, the fourth boy in his family born with haemophilia, who was also infected with hepatitis and HIV at Treloar.

Then there was Steve Dymond, a genial and witty former publisher with whom I developed a warm relationship following publication of that first article. He would send me regular updates on their campaign, his life and his condition. ‘I am beyond anger,’ he once wrote. ‘I’m trapped in a cold and dark place that I would not wish on anyone.’

Sadly he died the following year, aged 62, defeated by hepatitis C.

This sordid saga had to be dragged into the open, with the help of the much-maligned media, by the dogged persistence of these courageous patients and their families confronting a system that closed ranks.

As with the Post Office Horizon scandal, these campaigners were decent people forced into their bitter fight for justice against the sanctified institution of an uncaring state.

Reputations of blasé politicians, complacent civil servants and dismal doctors deserve to be shredded. The self-serving perpetrators of this cover-up, which has corroded trust in crucial institutions, should have been shamed and brought to book years ago.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has apologised for the state’s moral failure, yet it is nine years since one of his predecessors, David Cameron, apologised in Parliament and pledged recompense after a Scottish inquiry branded the tainted blood saga ‘the stuff of nightmares’.

That is nine years in which the horror story that shames the British state continued.

There now needs to be real action and honesty, together with a ruthless focus on ending these sickening cover-ups and failures in our state institutions.

It is time to bring to an end the hell endured for so long by Colin Smith’s family and so many others like them.

Categorised in: Health, home page, Public policy