If the number of people killed by contaminated blood had all died at once, it would have been seen for what it is: a huge and terrible disaster for which the only response was a full public inquiry. At least 2,000 have been killed by a treatment they believed would save their lives. Many were haemophiliacs. Others, like the Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, died many years after they had been given a transfusion of tainted blood. The extent of the damage that is being caused by the hepatitis C virus is only beginning to be clear. This is still an unfolding public health disaster that may not have been entirely averted, but unquestionably should have been halted years before it was. It is a great and terrible national scandal that dishonours the Department of Health and the governments that have provided neither justice nor proper compensation to the many innocent people whose lives have been so brutally shortened. The inquiry is a generation late. The delay has not only meant a denial of justice; it will make it much harder to trace responsibility or establish culpability. It is already clear that documents were long ago destroyed. Memories of events in the 1970s and 80s will be uncertain. Establishing who knew what, and when, will be all the trickier. But one injustice can end: the mean and complex financial arrangements for victims must be sorted out before more people die not knowing how their families are to be looked after. And the survivors, like the Hillsborough victims, must finally get the respect they’re due.
