Tainted blood scandal (United Kingdom)

The tainted blood scandal in the United Kingdom arose after approximately 4,500 people suffering from haemophilia and around 150 non-haemophiliacs became infected with hepatitis C and approximately 1,250 of them were co-infected with HIV, the virus that leads to acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), as a result of receiving contaminated clotting factor products supplied by the National Health Service (NHS) in the 1970s and 1980s. At least 2,000 haemophiliacs are thought to have been killed by the clotting agents and many others remain terminally ill. Of the victims who were co-infected with both hepatitis C and HIV, less than 250 are believed to survive as of 2017.

It is often misreported by sections of the media that the treatments were "blood transfusions", using images of surgical blood transfusions and blood packs. Actually, factor products were a processed pharmaceutical product falling under the Medicines Act and bore no resemblance to traditional blood transfusion. The infections were principally caused by the plasma product known as Factor VIII, a medicinal product that was sourced from the United States and elsewhere. The creation of such products involved dangerous manufacturing processes. Large groups of paid donors were used (as many as 60,000 per batch, and including prisoners and drug addicts); it only required one infected donor to contaminate an entire batch, which would then infect all of the patients that received that material. In contrast, this was at a time when the practice of paying donors for whole blood in the US had effectively ceased; the UK did not import whole blood from abroad, but it did import large quantities of Factor VIII given to haemophiliacs (as described in the documentary Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal). It is said that the principle reason that the UK imported these products was that it did not produce enough of its own.

No government, healthcare or pharmaceutical entity in the UK has admitted any liability in the scandal, and no damages have been paid to those infected or affected, although the government has provided some benefits to the victims. In the 1990s the government made ex gratia payments averaging £60,000 to each infected person on the condition that they waived their right to pursue any further legal action.

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