What is the contaminated blood scandal? Everything it’s good to know
The Infected Blood Inquiry will today conclude after decades of tireless work by campaigners.
Rishi Sunak is widely expected to issue an apology for failings that have claimed more than 3,000 lives and continue to wreck countless others.
The far-reaching inquiry, announced in 2017, will determine where responsibility lies with the scandal, amid allegations of a decades long cover-up by the NHS.
It is also expected to recommend compensation for victims, and attempt to conclude how many people have been affected both directly and indirectly.
Here, MailOnline explains everything you need to know about the scandal, ahead of the report’s publication.
Pictured: Portraits of people who have died or been affected by the infected blood scandal are put up as campaigners met in Parliament Square in London on May 19
Demonstrators pictured holding placards in London in July 2023
What is the infected blood scandal?
More than 30,000 people in the UK are thought to have been infected with HIV and hepatitis C at the hands of the NHS after being given contaminated blood products.
The scandal began in the early 1970s when new blood clotting products were developed to be used in treatments for people with bleeding disorders.
A shortage of blood in the UK led ministers to source cheap batches from the US where supplies relied on high-risk paid donors, many in prisons and including drug addicts.
The products were made by pooling the blood plasma from tens of thousands of donors and a single contaminated donation could be enough to infect an entire batch.
Most of those infected in the UK were people who received treatment for blood disorders such as haemophilia and those who had blood transfusions.
The inquiry was first announced by former prime minister Theresa May in 2017, with the first official hearing held on April 20 2019.
It is one of the largest UK public inquiries and has been led by former High Court judge Sir Brian Langstaff, who was appointed to chair in February 2018.
He has previous experience working in public inquiries, having served as lead counsel to the Bristol Royal Infirmary inquiry in 1998.
Some 374 people have given oral evidence, and the inquiry has received more than 5,000 witness statements and reviewed more than 100,000 documents.
Who was affected?
About 6,000 people with haemophilia — an inherited disorder where the blood does not clot properly — and other bleeding disorders were treated with contaminated products.
Around 1,250 were infected with HIV, including 380 children. Some unintentionally infected their partners. Fewer than 250 are still alive.
Others hit by the scandal include thousands given blood transfusions between 1970 and 1991.
High-profile victims include Body Shop founder Anita Roddick and Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies’s mother Sheila, who both contracted hepatitis C following transfusions of infected blood.
It has been estimated that one person dies as a result of infected blood every four days.
Campaigners have hailed the publication of the report as the ‘end of a 40-year fight’.
Suresh Vaghela, of Leicester, said he was feeling ‘nervous’ ahead of the final report.
The 61-year-old started receiving contaminated Factor VIII blood product to treat his haemophilia when he was around 13 years old, and was told when he started university in 1983 that he had HIV and had two months to live.
In the early 1990s, he discovered he had also been infected with hepatitis C.
Lauren Palmer lost her parents Stephen and Barbara within eight days of each other in 1993 after her father was given infected blood products for his severe haemophilia and passed HIV and hepatitis to her mother.
She previously described how their deaths ‘shattered’ their family and the lack of financial support held her back.
When asked if the children of infected blood victims had been neglected, she said ‘yes’.
Did the Government know about the risks?
This is one of the key questions the inquiry sets out to answer.
Evidence suggests that by the mid-1970s, there were repeated warnings that imported US Factor VIII — a blood clotting agent — carried a greater risk of infection.
But attempts to make the UK more self-sufficient in blood products failed, so the NHS continued using the donated blood.
According to the BBC, there is evidence that children were infected with hepatitis C and HIV after being placed on clinical trials of new treatments — often, without their family’s consent.
As late as November 1983, the government insisted there was no ‘conclusive proof’ that HIV could be transmitted in blood, a line robustly defended by former health minister Ken Clarke when he appeared before the inquiry.
Suresh Vaghela, of Leicester, said he was feeling ‘nervous’ ahead of the final report
Lauren Palmer lost her parents Stephen and Barbara within eight days of each other in 1993 after her father was given infected blood products for his severe haemophilia and passed HIV and hepatitis to her mother
The Infected Blood Inquiry in London heard Stephen was diagnosed with HIV in 1985, then later diagnosed with hepatitis B and hepatitis C, while Barbara (pictured with Lauren as a newborn) was diagnosed with HIV and hepatitis C in 1991
Lauren as a nine-year-old girl with her parents Stephen and Barbara
Official documents from the 1990s also show that cost concerns prevented the NHS from pursuing adequate testing or campaigns to raise awareness, the BBC also reported.
‘Raising awareness poses undoubted difficulties for the NHS,’ one internal government note reportedly said.
‘In terms of value for money, there may be better candidates for additional resources.’
So far, no organisation implicated in the scandal has admitted any liability.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt yesterday described the episode as ‘the worst scandal of my lifetime’.
He said the families ‘have got every right to be incredibly angry that generations of politicians, including me when I was health secretary, have not acted fast enough to address the scandal’.
What is the report expected to say?
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is widely expected to issue an apology following the publication of the report, which will lay bare the scale of the failings.
Whitehall sources expect NHS chief Amanda Pritchard to issue her own apology for the worst treatment disgrace in the history of the health service.
Tomorrow ministers will set out plans for a massive compensation scheme, which could cost taxpayers more than £10 billion.
Interim compensation payments of £100,000 have been made to around 4,000 infected people or bereaved partners.
Ministers recently announced that these interim payments would be extended to the ‘estates of the deceased’.
The chairman of the inquiry, Sir Brian Langstaff, has previously said that ‘wrongs were done at individual, collective and systemic levels’.
Campaigners have hailed the publication of the report as the ‘end of a 40-year fight’.
Labour health spokesman Wes Streeting yesterday said he expected Sir Brian to criticise ‘successive governments’ over the issue.
Mr Streeting said an incoming Labour administration would honour any compensation deal agreed by the Government, adding: ‘Everyone has got their responsibility to bear in this appalling scandal and we have got a shared responsibility to put it right.’
The moves come as former High Court judge Sir Brian Langstaff (pictured, in 2021) will publishes the long-awaited findings of a public inquiry on Monday
How have people reacted to the report’s publication?
Victims of the infected blood scandal today described feeling ’emotional and nervous’ ahead of the report’s publication.
One, however, today said any potential apology from the government ‘won’t bring back the dead’.
Ros Cooper, who was infected with hepatitis C after treatment for a bleeding disorder as a child, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that ‘words don’t mean a lot’.
‘To a lot of people who’ve lost loved ones, what are words going to do? It’s not going to bring back the dead, it’s not going to wash away crimes that have been committed,’ she said.
‘Lives were effectively ruined because of those decisions. Any kind of apology, to be worth anything to the victims, needs to come from somebody who truly understands that.’
Dr Gail Miflin, chief medical officer at NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) – which is responsible for blood services in England and organ donation services across the UK – has today also reassured there are a number of checks in place now to ensure that blood is as safe as it can be.
‘Today, things are very different, we have lots of different systems and processes in place,’ she said.
She said the tests are ‘more modern’ and the science ‘has moved on a long way’ since the 1980s and 1990s.
