The public health system and the British government “covered up” a contaminated blood transfusion scandal in the United Kingdom for decades after victims were knowingly exposed to “unacceptable” risks, according to a report released this Monday.
Transfusions with contaminated blood reportedly infected more than 30,000 people with HIV and hepatitis C.
The investigation, carried out for five years in the United Kingdom by Judge Brian Langstaff, determined, according to the findings released this Monday, that the infections and deaths of patients were not an “accident” but could have “mostly been avoided.” .
The former magistrate in charge of the investigation said the infected blood disaster “continues to occur” today, as some of the affected patients “continue to die every week.”
Among the errors detected, it was reported that the health authorities were “too slow” in responding to the risks and a “failure in the licensing regime” was identified in imports (from United States donors) that “were understood to be “They were less safe than national treatments.”
“The inept and fragmented donation system in the United Kingdom at the time meant that there were failures to ensure a sufficient supply of so-called Factor VIII from British donors,” the document notes.
There has also been evidence that suggests that there were children who were treated “unnecessarily” with “unsafe” treatments and some were used as “research objects” while the risks of contracting hepatitis and HIV were ignored in a school in the country. that the student was treated for hemophilia.
In relation to that case, which occurred at the Lord Mayor Treloar College boarding school, in the English county of Hampshire (England), in the decades of the 70s and 80s, “very few (of the treated students) escaped being infected” and of the 122 students with hemophilia who attended that center between 1970 and 1987, only 30 are still alive today, according to this.
The scandal originated during the aforementioned decades, when thousands of people who required blood transfusions and medications for hemophilia in the Public Health System (NHS) were exposed to blood contaminated with HIV, Hepatitis B, C and chronic viral diseases as a result of the lack analysis that controlled donations.
Blood contaminated with hepatitis C continued to be used until 1991, two years after the virus was formally identified.
Apparently, more than 30,000 public health patients may have been infected, and over the years some 2,900 adults and children died as a result of one of the largest health disasters in the country’s history.
In the 1970s, a new treatment for hemophilia was introduced that required a large amount of blood reserves, forcing the United Kingdom to import it from the United States, where donors – many of them from risk groups such as drug addicts, sex workers and prisoners – received payment for their blood.
