LONDON (AP) — British authorities and the country's public health service committed a “catalogue of failures” and knowingly exposed tens of thousands of patients to deadly infections through contaminated blood and blood products, an inquiry into the U.K.’s infected blood scandal found Monday.
An estimated 3,000 people in the United Kingdom are believed to have died and many others were left with lifelong illnesses after receiving blood or blood products tainted with HIV or hepatitis in the 1970s to the early 1990s. The scandal is widely seen as the deadliest disaster in the history of Britain’s state-run National Health Service since its inception in 1948. Former judge Brian Langstaff, who chaired the inquiry, slammed successive governments and medical professionals for failing to avoid the tragedy to save face and expense.
He found that deliberate attempts were made to conceal the disaster, and there was evidence of government officials destroying documents. “This disaster was not an accident. The infections happened because those in authority — doctors, the blood services and successive governments — did not put patient safety first,” he said.
“The response of those in authority served to compound people’s suffering.” Many of those affected were people with hemophilia, a condition affecting the blood’s ability to clot. In the 1970s, patients were given a new treatment that the U.
K. imported from the United States. Some of the plasma used to make th.