This article appears as part of the Inside the NHS newsletter. It was the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS – a scandal characterised by "an attitude of denial" and a "lack of openness, transparency and candour" by the NHS and successive governments which included the "deliberate destruction of some documents and the loss of others". In a vast-ranging report into the use of blood products contaminated with HIV and hepatitis during the 1970s and 80s, Sir Brian Langstaff criticised repeated breaches of patient safety and consent – including doctors testing patients for diseases without their knowledge, but failing to inform them of any subsequent diagnoses – and the fixation of officials on an absence of "conclusive proof" that tainted transfusions were sickening patients as justifiable grounds for doing nothing.
Instead, they should have been "asking if there was a real risk" and taking precautions. Had they done so at the earliest possible stage, the tragedy – which has so far claimed 3000 lives, many of them children – "could largely, though not entirely, have been avoided". What have we learned about Scotland's role? Alarm Bells There were warnings that hepatitis could be spread via blood as early as December 1964, when a memo from the Scottish Home and Health Department (SHHD) noted that "all blood for transfusion must be regarded as potentially contaminated.
.. no transfusion should be undertaken unless the benefits outweigh the risk of hepatitis.