Most people have no way of knowing the technical intricacies of the risks and benefits of blood transfusion, and most people have no need to know the details of such matters. But few readers of newspapers or watchers of television news during last week can have been left in any doubt of the horrendous consequences for patients when the checks and balances which ensure the safety of the blood supply are compromised. The tales of fear and hurt relayed to Her Honour, Judge Alison Lindsay, by the haemophiliac men and their close families made harrowing reading about people in need whose needs were not adequately met when the very blood products on which the men's lives depended became the vectors of the viruses which cause HIV and hepatitis C. More than 60 men have died as a result.
This week there are more painful stories to be told to Judge Lindsay's tribunal and it is greatly to the credit of those who have decided to be witnesses before her that they have made so clear to so many people just why a formal tribunal should have been set up to inquire into the issues. By the end of this week there will have been a whole social context constructed against which to set what is likely to become a more technical inquiry as it moves to find out exactly what went wrong with the particular blood products that were administered to nearly 300 haemophiliac patients.
These patients had, with good reason, come to rely on the products provided to them by their doctors and the Blood Bank which had so improved their lives relative to earlier generations of haemophilia sufferers. The provision of clotting factors which were missing in haemophilia made great strides towards eliminating the bleeding episodes that could, and did, so cripple the lives of earlier haemophiliac patients.
But, quite quickly, the actively life-saving blood products became carriers of diseases that could of themselves be life-threatening. Tragically, the change from life-saver to life-taker was not noticed in time, with the kind of medical, social and emotional consequences that Judge Lindsay heard about last week and is still hearing about this week. It will be well to bear in mind all the personal and family pain being recounted now when the tribunal moves on later in the summer to delve into the technical problems which resulted in all this family stress, pain and turmoil. This is no mere technical problem that is being investigated. The causes of the pain must be elucidated.
Some of the problems have already been identified during the course of the earlier Finlay Tribunal into how blood became contaminated with viruses under the auspices of the National Blood Transfusion Services Board. Many will doubtless recall clearly the courage of women with hepatitis C who gave evidence to that tribunal. Many may recall with less clarity the precise findings of that tribunal which were recorded with commendable speed and great clarity by Mr Justice Finlay. It is just as important for the haemophiliac sufferers and their families that they be enabled to find out exactly what happened to make their family and personal lives so unbearable as a result of taking a previously beneficial and live-saving blood product. They need to know.