THE families of the blood scandal victims told yesterday how their loved ones had been robbed of life — and those responsible should be punished. One, tiny Colin Smith , was infected with HIV and hepatitis C during a medical procedure when he was just 10 months old. He developed AIDS and tragically died aged seven, weighing just 13lbs, in 1990.
His father, also called Colin, and mum Janet told how they tried in vain to get help for their critically ill son. They said his doctor told them the boy had a “vivid imagination” when he complained of chest pains. Janet said: “They had us down as overprotective parents but we knew our son, we knew he was suffering.
He had AIDS but they kept it from us. "We had ‘AIDS dead’ written on the side of the house, we had crosses scraped into the front door and we were getting phone calls saying he should be ‘locked in a room’.” The couple, from Newport, South Wales , have a suitcase full of their son’s toys and drawings.
Janet pulls out a blue blanket and holds it close to her face, telling Sky News: “It still smells of him. This is the blanket he was wrapped in when he died.” Demands are now growing for criminal prosecutions following decades of cover-ups after 30,000 were infected with contaminated blood, killing more than 3,000.
The public inquiry by Sir Brian Langstaff found that people “put their faith in doctors and in the government...
and their trust was betrayed”. Experts knew from at least 1973 that using .