The death of Ian Long’s father from HIV – which he contracted through receiving contaminated blood – has cast a lengthy shadow over his life. Long, 48, recalls seeing his mother crying and her health deteriorating from stress, his father losing his job due to stigma and descending into alcoholism, while he went off the rails, getting kicked out of school and compromising a promising professional football career because he didn’t feel he could move away from home. “There’s not a day that goes by you don’t think of [my dad],” he said, recalling how his grief was so deep he would catch glimpses of his father standing on the sidelines at his football matches after his death.
This is why he feels so strongly that someone must be held responsible for what his family went through, and like many other family members of victims of the infected blood scandal, he wants to see criminal charges brought against the politicians and doctors involved. “I’m not quite sure how they got away with some of the stuff they got away with, but it feels like one rule for the elite and one rule for everyone else. Imagine what would happen if I went around infecting people – people have been convicted for that.
If you knowingly infected somebody with a death sentence, surely there should be something that they should be brought to book for,” he said. Long would like to gain closure and see justice via a case for corporate manslaughter, similar to France. “In this country, it jus.
