Contaminated Blood

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend has put her finger on the point. With Hillsborough, when we finally got to match up documents held at a local level with those held at the national level, the full picture began to emerge. It is my contention that exactly the same would emerge here. The direct examples of a cover-up that I am about to give, relating to individual cases, would then be put together with what we know about documents held—or, indeed, not held, which itself implies wrongdoing—at a national level. In the end, it is the putting together of that picture that gives people the truth and allows them to understand how this happened. I will come directly to that point later.

I will focus on three cases. I highlight them not because they are the only ones I have seen or been sent, but because I have met or spoken directly to the individuals concerned, have a high degree of confidence in the facts and believe that these cases are representative of many more. The first case is of a gentleman who does not want to be named. I will call him Stuart, but I do have his full details.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

One of the reasons why this has not taken off widely as a real campaign is that victims understandably do not want to advertise their condition to those around them. I pay tribute to those who have talked to Members of Parliament, even on a confidential basis, so that some of us have some ammunition.

[Andy Burnham]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct. There is a stigma related to HIV and hepatitis. People do not want to talk about it openly. Although I have drawn a parallel with Hillsborough—the hon. Gentleman was outstanding in his support for me on that issue—there are many differences, and one major difference is that, with Hillsborough, the event happened on one day, and everybody was watching it and can remember where they were when the pictures came through. This scandal was a silent one, which affected people in all parts of the country and all walks of life—not people from a similar place. These people were spread about and unable to organise in the same way the Hillsborough campaigners were. That is another reason why they have not been able to move things forward, and the reason the hon. Gentleman gave is true, too.

When Stuart was six years old, he was sent by Maidstone hospital to the Lewisham and Oxford haemophilia centres to have tests to see whether he had haemophilia. When he was seven, they wrote back and said that all the tests were normal and that he did not have a bleeding problem. When he was eight, he attended Maidstone hospital with a swollen knee—nothing more. It was not life threatening, and he had no bleeding problem associated with it.

Then, with no warning to Stuart or his parents, Maidstone hospital treated him with 12 transfusions of contaminated blood products over three days. According to his medical records later, that should not have happened. Then, in 1986, the hospital, unbeknownst to Stuart, carried out an HIV and a hepatitis B test on him. He was never tested for hepatitis C, even though his records show that a test was available at the time. He was not tested in 1989 or called back as other tests became available. He has all his medical records, but one thing is missing: the batch numbers for the contaminated blood products.

Stuart was eventually told he had a hepatitis C infection in—listen to this, Madam Deputy Speaker—January 2013. He was also told that it was too late for him to pursue a court case, despite the fact that legal experts said that what had happened to him was negligent and he firmly believes there has been a cover-up.

Let me move on to the case of a woman called Nicola Enstone-Jones. She wrote:

“As a female with haemophilia diagnosed in the ‘70s. From the age of 9 my parents spent years trying to find out what happened to me after receiving Factor VIII, this was in 1980…Dr’s denying anything was wrong with me, referring to me as having psychological problems, as there was nothing wrong with the treatment they gave.”

She says that that was not unusual for haemophiliacs growing up then. She goes on:

“It was when I was 24”—

24!—

“in 1995 that I asked a nurse if I’d ever been tested for Hepatitis C, as my mum had seen on the news about Haemophiliacs being diagnosed and dying from this new strain of Hepatitis, and all the signs and symptoms listed was me.

The nurse laughed at me and said ‘you won’t have that’; then came back with my medical notes and informed me I was positive to Hepatitis C from a test…done in 1991. A test I knew nothing about... like a true haemophiliac and after spending years of searching for answers I had suddenly found out why I had suffered health problems since childhood.”

However, it was only later, when Nicola was able to access her medical notes, that she found an entry for 1990, which she has drawn to my attention, and I have it in my hand. The notes say: “Discussed hepatitis C”. Nicola has told me directly that that never happened—it was never discussed with her in 1990. She found out for the first time in 1995.

This story actually gets quite a lot worse. Let me read out what Nicola goes on to say:

“Little did I know almost 19 years later I would be at a police station reporting what I”

believe

“to be a criminal act and a form of abuse on my own child, once again…Dr’s performing tests”

without consent,

“another well-known”

practice

“which Haemophiliacs are sadly used to.

I had found out in 2013 that my 9 year old haemophilic son had been tested for HIV and hepatitis’s and no doubt a whole host of other viruses and pathogens, just like I had been when I was younger. Given my daughter has a bleeding disorder too, there is no doubt in my mind she will have been tested...I found this out third hand, by chance in a letter which was another professional”

asking

“if my son needed treatment abroad. The letter stated ‘This 9 year old haemophilic has a factor VIII level of 10% and…has been tested for HIV and hepatitis…which he is negative to.’”

She had never been told about this or given consent for her son to be tested. She says:

“Surely this isn’t right, in this day and age”.

In my view, it is a criminal act to test a child without a parent’s knowledge.

Let me come on to the third case, which, in my view, is the most troubling of them all. It relates to a gentleman called Kenneth David Bullock—Ken Bullock. Ken was a very high-ranking civil engineer who worked around the world. In his later career, he spent time advising what was then called the Overseas Development Agency. He was a haemophiliac. Sadly, Ken died in 1998—a very traumatic death, unfortunately. Let me read from the letter that his widow, Hazel Bullock, sent to me a few weeks ago:

“I am so relieved to hear you are still committed to an active”

inquiry into

“the contaminated blood tragedy…Between the 15th November, 1983 and the 3rd December, 1983, my husband stopped being a Haemophiliac patient who had been infected with NonA-NonB type Hepatitis to being a clinical alcoholic…This accusation continued and escalated during the next fifteen years completely unknown to him, he was refused a liver transplant in 1998 and left to die still unaware of these appalling accusations. He did not drink alcohol.”

Mrs Bullock has examined her late husband’s medical notes in detail. Again, I have them here in my possession today. An entry in his notes from February 1983 says, “Acute Hepatitis”. Another from March says:

“NonA NonB Hepatitis which he probably obtained from Cryo-precipitate”—

the recognised treatment at the time. Again in 1983, the notes say:

“In view of his exposure to blood products a diagnosis of NonA NonB was made.”

However, it would seem at that point that all mention of blood products was to be stopped, very suddenly. Mrs Bullock says:

“They were never again to be found anywhere in my husband’s notes. From the 15th December, 1983 all the hospital records refer only to alcoholic damage to the liver. I have in my possession full copies of all the following notes.”

In December 1983, the notes say, “alcohol could be considered”; in 1994,

“likes a few beers at week-ends”;

in 1995, “alcohol related hepatic dysfunction”; in 1995 again, “clinical alcoholism”; and in 1996, “chronic high alcohol consumption.” In 1998, the year that Mr Bullock died, they say, “alcoholic cirrhosis.”

Mrs Bullock concludes her letter:

“My husband died on the 3rd October, 1998. At no time during this 15 years should alcohol have been mentioned. My husband’s rare and occasional glass of wine was minimal. He never drank beer or spirits. Alcohol was never a part of our lives and he had his last glass of wine on 18th June 1995, my 60th birthday. My husband died completely unaware of these accusations that have shocked family, friends and colleagues alike.”

Just as the evidence of amended police statements provided the thread that we eventually pulled to unravel the Hillsborough cover-up, so I believe the evidence that I have just provided must now become the trigger for a wider inquiry into establishing the truth about contaminated blood. There is a very disturbing echo of Hillsborough—is there not?—in what I have just said. People who were the victims of negligence by the state were suddenly the victims of smears perpetrated by those working on behalf of public bodies, particularly smears related to alcohol, suggesting that the disease that afflicted Mr Bullock’s liver was self-inflicted. That reminds me, of course, of the front-page newspaper stories that appeared straight after Hillsborough that alleged that Liverpool fans were drunk. It is a time-honoured tactic—is it not?—to deflect the blame from where it should be over to somewhere else.

It is of course possible that in each of the cases that I have mentioned the hospitals and clinicians concerned were acting on an individual basis to prevent their negligent practices from being known. I have to say, however, that I doubt that that was the case. My suspicion, as I said a moment ago to my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North, is that there are documents held at a national level, either by the Government or by regulatory or professional bodies, that point to a more systematic effort to suppress the truth.

I actually have two documents in my possession—this will save the Minister and the Government time if they want to suggest that there are no such documents—and I want to put them on the official record. The first is a letter sent in January 1975 by Stanford University’s medical centre to the Blood Products Laboratory, which was the UK Government’s wholly owned blood products operation. The letter goes to great lengths warning about the risk of the new factor VIII products that were coming on to the market. The gentleman who wrote it, Mr Allen, said of one particular product that the

“source of blood is 100 percent from Skid-Row derelicts”.

He was writing to warn the British Government about the blood products that were being used.

The second document is from the Oxford Haemophilia Centre and it was sent in January 1982 to all haemophilia centre directors in England. It says of the new products coming on to the market:

“Although initial production batches may have been tested for infectivity by injecting them into chimpanzees it is unlikely that the manufacturers will be able to guarantee this form of quality control for all future batches. It is therefore very important to find out by studies in human beings to what extent the infectivity of the various concentrates has been reduced. The most clear cut way of doing this is by administering those concentrates to patients requiring treatment who have not been previously exposed to large pool concentrates.”

In other words, it is saying: let us find out whether there is “infectivity”—to use its word—in the products by using patients as guinea pigs, without regard for the consequences. That is proof, in my view, of negligence of a very serious kind.

That brings me to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North raised earlier. When we read the warning from the Americans in 1975 about blood products being derived from blood that had been taken off convicts on skid row and the letter some seven years later in which the Oxford Haemophilia Centre stated that it was necessary to push on with trials—to find out whether the products were infectious by giving them to patients—we soon start to see that there was something here that needed to be hidden.

In addition, we must consider the fact that all the papers belonging to a Health Minister were, as I understand it, comprehensively destroyed under something called the 10-year rule. I have been a Minister, and I have never heard of the 10-year rule. Have you, Madam Deputy Speaker? It is a new one on me. A Minister’s papers were destroyed without his consent. To me, that sounds alarm bells and suggests that something is seriously amiss.

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[Andy Burnham]

I think it has such a feel. For me, the whole thing about finance—it is always about finance, and about whether we can give them a bit more—has been helpful to the Government, because it has meant that they have never focused on the issue they should really focus on. As I said at the beginning, if this had been known about, the wave of support behind the people struggling to find out the truth would have been massive—absolutely massive—and the Government would have had nowhere to go and would have had to respond. Consequently, people are still struggling, such as my hon. Friend’s constituent, and I hope that they will not have to struggle for much longer.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

It seems to me that the right hon. Gentleman is making three major points. The first is that those still alive who are affected and their families need proper, generous help without delay. The second is that there should be an inquiry into what went wrong all the way through, especially about whether people have interfered with the preservation of evidence. Whether people are prosecuted is a separate issue, but actually knowing what happened is what matters most. The third point—this is really the one in my mind—is that there was a difference, as Richard Titmuss pointed out in 1970 in his book “The Gift Relationship”, between blood donations in Britain, where they were freely given by the healthy, and donations in the States, which came from the sources the right hon. Gentleman has mentioned. If that was stated in a book in 1970, people should have paid attention as soon as they had any warning at all, whether from Stanford or from anybody else.

[Andy Burnham]

That was the direct content of the Stanford letter. There was a worry that the NHS was using such products in a completely different context, not understanding the difference between the two systems. That was the Stanford letter.

I am not standing here claiming to be an expert on all the papers, because I am not; I am saying what I know, from the people I have spoken to, to be wrong, and linking that to the documents in order to say what I believe to be the case. I may not be right, but we need to find out whether I am right, and that is the point that I will be putting to the Government.

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[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

May I speak briefly in this debate? The right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) has helped, and the Minister has rightly said that she will consider what he has said and the papers he might be able to provide. May I add that there are still victims who have unmet costs; I have one in my constituency whom I am concerned about? May I suggest that over the election period ministerial advisers pay attention to the comparisons with Hillsborough, and say that it is not just the Government-held papers that matter, but also the ones held in the health service? So, for example, if someone who has died had been told he drank too much when he did not drink seriously at all, that could be part of the evidence that comes into an inquiry.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

There people are dying, yet this goes on and on. People want closure; they know they are coming to the end of their lives, and that they will not get that closure.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

That is one of the reasons why I believe that over the election period the advisers to Ministers—not just to Health Ministers, but perhaps also to Home Office Ministers—should consider what could be obtained by the kind of call for evidence and inquiry that the right hon. Member for Leigh has rightly proposed.

[Andy Burnham]

rose—

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

If the right hon. Gentleman has any other points he wants to make through me, he is welcome to do so.

[Andy Burnham]

I am grateful for the opportunity. The Minister was very kind in her remarks, but the point that perhaps was missed when referencing Archer and Penrose is that I am calling for a different process that takes documents at a very local level and matches them with documents higher up the chain. It is only then that we can put the jigsaw together and start to understand why someone was acting in a certain way in a particular hospital. That is what we are looking for, and that was the strength of the Hillsborough independent panel: it was able to paint that canvas and put all the pieces of the jigsaw together.

I will send the evidence to the Department. The amended police statements only came to light properly just before the 20th anniversary of Hillsborough. What I have presented to the House tonight is altered medical records—that is a fact; that has been given to me. In my view, that is the same trigger and it should be looked into so that the facts can be established. That is new evidence that the Government now need to consider, to take a new decision on this.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

The right hon. Gentleman has taken the words out of my mouth, and has said it better than I could have. We are all grateful to him. The point is that this scandal should never have happened, when it was started it should have been stopped, and when it had been stopped people should have known why it had gone on for as long as it did. The right hon. Gentleman has done a service.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

The House should not forget that there was a tribunal of inquiry in Ireland. The Lindsay inquiry found that the state knew of the risks and continued nevertheless, because that was what other states such as the UK were doing. So is it credible that an inquiry in Ireland could find that the risks were known but the practice carried on anyway, and that a further investigation through a panel such as that mentioned by the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) would not come to that same conclusion?

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

That is one of the questions to be asked.

I conclude by thanking the right hon. Member for Leigh and the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) who leads the all-party group on haemophilia and contaminated blood, and my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), sitting in front of me, who has done so much, both as a Back Bencher and a Minister, to make sure that these issues are dealt with.

[Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

Of course.

[Dr Whitford]

I know that the Penrose inquiry is always cast up as having dealt with this issue, but that was a Scottish inquiry and it was not able to summon people from the rest of the UK who did not want to attend. Therefore, the idea that Penrose has dealt with this is fallacious. We must have a system where we can summon people to give evidence right across the United Kingdom.