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Who Is To Blame for the UK Contaminated Blood Scandal?
Over 3000 people are estimated to have died and that number continues to rise.
Imagine you have a life-threatening medical condition that means you are reliant on your government’s national health service to provide you with blood transfusions to keep you alive. You put your trust in this health service and they repay you by providing you with blood transfusions contaminated with HIV and Hepatitis C. When the government and national health service find out that the blood they are using is probably contaminated they just keep using it, without telling you or other patients, likely for financial reasons, and when the contamination becomes public knowledge they refuse to accept culpability.
This is exactly what happened in the UK in the 1970s and the 1980s to 4689 patients (some estimates say closer to 6,000 patients) who received contaminated blood transfusions from the UK’s National Health Service. The whole sorry scenario has been labelled the ‘UK contaminated blood scandal’.
The majority of patients that received these contaminated transfusions had Haemophilia; haemophiliacs have a deficiency in clotting agents in their blood, which makes it harder for them to stop bleeding, even from small cuts and bruises, they need regular transfusions of…
