"The worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS"

More details emerged last night of the way government advisers handled the haemophilia scandal which saw thousands of UK patients infected with US imported blood.

Yesterday the Guardian revealed that the Department of Health was warned of the HIV danger from US blood products in 1983, but its advisers on the Committee on the Safety of Medicines decided not to ban imported blood for fear the UK would not have sufficient supplies.

A total of 1,757 people died and many are terminally ill following the scandal dubbed the "worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS" by Labour peer Lord Winston.

Now, campaigners who have finally won the right to a public inquiry, say they have discovered evidence that the government also knew that there was a risk of patients contracting the potentially lethal virus hepatitis C in blood products imported from the US as early as the 1970s.
Years after the government said documents relating to the safety of the UK's blood supply had been destroyed, a public inquiry conducted by Lord Archer of Sandwell has been told by the Department of Health that most have resurfaced. Among 5,000 documents being made available to the inquiry are papers relating to the dangers of hepatitis C in blood collected from paid US donors.

One of the documents, summaries of which have been placed in the library of the Palace of Westminster, contains minutes of a meeting of the Medical Research Council on February 12 1979, which discussed the possible contamination of US blood products with a virus known only then as "non A, non B hepatitis" which is now identified as hepatitis C.

"In agreeing that post-transfusion hepatitis was rare in the UK, concern was expressed about the continued use of commercial plasma products, many of which were produced in the US and carried a high risk of transmitting non A, non B hepatitis," it says.

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