Thousands of haemophiliacs may have become unnecessarily infected with HIV and hepatitis because the Department of Health failed to honour promises to cut risks from contaminated blood more than 25 years ago, Lord Owen, a health minister at the time, has conceded.
The former leader of the SDP calls on the government to make a "generous" increase in compensation to victims suffering from multiple infections, adding to the growing pressure for a new investigation into policies over blood supplies followed by successive administrations.
The NHS is thought to have accidentally infected 4,800 haemophiliacs with hepatitis C. Of these 1,200 were also infected by HIV, of whom just a third remain alive.
Now English haemophiliacs are demanding the right to use synthetic clotting factors, already available in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, because of fears they might get infected with the human form of BSE through contaminated blood products.
Lord [David] Owen, a Labour health minister in the Callaghan government in 1975, allocated millions of pounds to making Britain self-sufficient in blood, but imports continued. In an interview for BBC Radio 4's Face the Facts today he says he was concerned that tainted blood may be entering the country because US authorities paid donors, thus encouraging donations from drug addicts and prisoners.
"There is no doubt we should have been made self-sufficient and had we been made self-sufficient, fewer people would be suffering from these viruses and illnesses now."
But it was only years later in the 1980s, as haemophiliacs were diagnosed with HIV, that he realised his plans had not been carried out.
"I was very upset that the decision I had taken in 1975 had not been fulfilled. There was resistance at the Department of Health at the time in putting in the money. I think some people felt this was an unknown danger, that we were putting money in without knowing what the viruses were."
The Tory government in the early 1990s reached a settlement with those infected with HIV but this included a waiver that barred anyone seeking further redress if they also contracted hepatitis.
