Britain covered up tainted blood supply that killed thousands, report finds
The British government “did not put patient safety first” while covering up a multi-decade episode of tainted blood, leading to thousands of related deaths, a report published Monday found.
Britain’s National Health Service allowed blood tainted with HIV and hepatitis virus to be used on patients without their knowledge, leading to 3,000 deaths and more than 30,000 infections, according to the 2,527-page final report by Justice Brian Justice Langstaff, a former judge on the High Court of England and Wales.
Langstaff oversaw a five-year investigation into the use of tainted blood and blood products in Britain’s health-care system between 1970 and 1991.
The report blames multiple administrations over that period for knowingly exposing victims to unacceptable risks.
Patients were exposed through a variety of methods, including blood transfusions or being given blood plasma or other blood products to treat conditions such as hemophilia.
In several cases, health officials lied about the risks to patients. In others, patients were infected during research without their knowledge or consent, among them children whose parents’ consent was not sought.
Tainted blood and blood products came from within Britain but were also imported from the United States, often in the form of treatments for people with hemophilia.
Langstaff’s report found serious failures in the screening of donors, including collecting blood from prisons, which are considered high-risk. The NHS also gave patients false reassurances, an attempt to “save face,” failing victims “not once but repeatedly.”
The report also criticizes health officials for ignoring recommendations and warnings — sometimes issued years earlier — concerning the need for morethorough hepatitis testing.
The situation could “largely, though not entirely, have been avoided,” Langstaff found.
“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,” Langstaff wrote.
“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.”
The British government on Monday began operating a support phone line for people and their families affected by the tainted blood.
The report is not the first time a Western country has been criticized for covering up a scandal over tainted blood.
In 1997, the Commission of Inquiry on the Blood System in Canada published its Krever Report, which found the federal government and health officials were aware of the risks of HIV and hepatitis transmission. Some
30,000 people were infected with hepatitis and 2,000 with HIV during the 1970s and ’80s in Canada, and around 8,000 died.