The devastating impact of the contaminated blood disaster on British families is all too familiar to Canadians. Thousands of families in both countries remain haunted by a story that is layered in tragedy. Although Theresa May has finally capitulated to demands for a public inquiry two decades after Canada’s, there are early warning signs about how it will be handled. Stark lessons can be learned from the Canadian experience.
In the 1980s and 90s, up to 30,000 Canadians were infected with hepatitis C and 2,000 with HIV from contaminated blood products. It is estimated that 8,000 Canadians have lost their lives as a result. In Britain lives were also lost, up to 2,400 of them, according to the campaign group Tainted Blood, due to systematic failures to protect the NHS blood supply.
In both countries, the public health calamity was preventable. But recent moves to privatise Canada’s blood system are laying the foundation for history to repeat itself.
Blood for profit was one of the leading causes of contaminated blood. Canada was not alone in allowing tainted blood-plasma products to be imported. The source of the plasma was high-risk populations in the US, where donors were being paid to sell their plasma for a pittance. The most abhorrent example was the import of plasma from the Arkansas prison system. Lack of national oversight, bureaucratic inertia, homophobia and cost cutting were all contributors to the scandal. Blood and blood products are expensive and the cost of taking action trumped the protection of human lives: a display of inhumanity and wilful blindness that was staggering.
In Canada, the Krever inquiry into the disaster had a very clear mission: it was not to be a witch-hunt but a fact-finding mission to deliver the whole truth.
The inquiry in Britain needs to have a similar mandate to allow for total transparency. Although Canada’s inquiry operated independently, the government still attempted to tamper with the process, seeking, for example, to stop Justice Krever from naming those responsible. This was eventually overruled by the supreme court in favour of Krever. This should be a warning to the inquiry in Britain.
The British government will also be reluctant to pay out compensation and may create delays in order to weaken the process and burn out campaigners. It is therefore crucial that a framework be created right from the start to protect the inquiry from derailment. Political interference must be avoided at all costs. The Department of Health should have no hand in the process and contaminated blood victims’ families need to be at the heart of the inquiry.
The inquiry should allow for all those affected to submit testimonies and evidence. This includes those who received blood transfusions and the secondarily infected: spouses, partners and children. A special section must be dedicated to people with haemophilia whose blood-plasma medications were infected with tainted blood, making them especially vulnerable. The inquiry should welcome experts from around the world to testify under oath without fear of recrimination.
When Justice Krever released his findings in Canada he included a clear set of recommendations, the primary being no-fault compensation to those who were impacted. The second recommendation was that blood should be protected as a public resource.
Twenty years after Canada’s inquiry, the world’s blood system is again under threat. Blood-plasma is once again being sourced from vulnerable populations in the US. The risks of history repeating itself are staggering as the lessons learned from Canada’s crisis are discarded.
Justin Trudeau’s government has welcomed blood brokers into Canada to harvest blood-plasma, some of which may be sold for profit on the international market. This has set the stage for a major fight to protect what tainted blood survivors in Canada fought so hard for: a safe, public blood system. In the UK, the Tories sold the NHS plasma company to a private firm that is now owned by a company based in China.
Britain has a chance to not only deliver justice to contaminated blood victims but to take steps to protect the national blood system in future. Canadians had to learn the hard way that history can be forgotten for political expediency. British families should not have to endure the same fate.