IT'S one thing for 12 children to tragically lose their mother as the "result of an act of God, like cancer" or a heart attack. It is quite another for children to lose their mother and for a man to lose his wife as a result of what they believe to be an act of gross incompetence. Or, as Moire Geoghegan Quinn once told the Dail, "a massive cover up" of "absolute recklessness".
We can only imagine their anger this morning as they mourn the death of Brigid McCole, who was bringing the first test case to the High Court seeking compensation for infection from contaminated blood or blood products. Some 1,600 people have been so infected.
blood or blood products. Some 1,600 people have been so infected.
These women are suffering from a condition which, in the beginning, the Government health authorities tried to tell them was nothing to worry about. The impression we were all given was that there was some risk but nobody was supposed to die. And, especially, nobody was supposed to die young.
A spokesman for the Blood Transfusion Service Board said last night the board was going to admit negligence in court in the case of Ms McCole but it was going to deny aggravated negligence.
The basic rationale is this the board admits that it was wrong to break its own rules by knowingly using blood from a woman who had suffered jaundice in order to manufacture anti D in 1977, thereby ensuring that 1,600 people would be infected with hepatitis C.
However, at the time, hepatitis C had yet to be discovered and the board knew only that the woman's jaundice was caused by non A non B hepatitis, which was then regarded as community acquired or non infectious. Therefore, the board's lawyers would have argued that the board did not deliberately take actions which led to Ms McCole's tragic hepatitis C infection. And, according to its spokesman last night, it intends to follow this line in all other court cases.
Such legal manoeuvres only seem to heighten the fear that 1,600 people have had their lives forever altered and - in some cases - shortened by a medical disaster which is yet to be satisfactorily explained.
For those affected, it has been the ultimate 20th century nightmare of the individual versus a State in a state of denial.
For many, the nightmare started with an advertisement in the newspapers of February 23rd, 1994 - a public information announcement which would horrify 100,000 women who received anti-D in the late stages of pregnancy and who must now have blood tests for hepatitis C.
On that day, thousands of terrified mothers began to file into Mespil House, each not knowing "what horrors would be revealed," not knowing what she would have to tell her husband and children: waiting at home.
Their fear on that day was palpable - but so was their anger. Many knew in their bones that they should not trust the BTSB and that they could not trust the Government's message of reassurance. Many of them felt this as keenly as they did that other horrendous truth - that their health had possibly been undermined by a technological nightmare which they did not understand.
In 1995, their women's intuition turned out to be correct. They learned that a woman whose blood had been used to make five batches of anti D vaccine in 1976 had developed jaundice shortly afterwards. The board went against its own rules and used her blood In 1977, six women developed jaundice after receiving anti D, although the BTSB always claimed without any hard evidence it turned out that these were coincidentally infected for environmental reasons.
For 14 years, their blood samples lay in a freezer in Middlesex Hospital. In December 1991, the hospital dropped a bombshell which should have triggered the biggest medical scare this State has ever seen but did not. It reported to the BTSB that four of the samples had been revealed to have hepatitis C anti bodies and" that there was "considerable evidence" that anti D was implicated.
For two years, this information was, to put it politely, overlooked as women continued to receive anti D and as those who had been unknowingly infected began to feel the first symptoms of the virus which lurked in their blood.
At least eight unsuspecting women received doses after February 1994, when the product was recalled.
The expert group which reported on the blood scandal seemed to feel as bewildered as the women they were trying to protect. The expert group complained that they had difficulty getting "adequate information" from the BTSB in "the initial stages" of the investigation.
In April of this year, as the High Court case against the BTSB got under way, the damning truth was revealed - the woman whose blood had been used to make antiD in 1976 had got hepatitis not from environmental factors but from infection.
While the truth is being fought out in the courts, many will be asking why, if we can spend £200 million on a beef tribunal, can we not force the Government to investigate the anti D scandal?