Contaminated Blood and Blood Products

Robert Flello Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robinson]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend, who makes a most poignant and correct intervention, if I may say so. We had a unique opportunity. The issue had moved right up in the public’s awareness. The sort of thing that we get in these debates is everybody saying how terrible it is, but then heaving a sigh of relief that they have not been affected, and on we go. The months and years drag by, and so the number comes down, from 4,600 to 2,700. Perhaps not many will be affected, but as my hon. Friend said, the nature of the diseases is that they spread, and the suffering will continue long after most of us have left this House.

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. At the end of the 1980s, I worked with someone called Colin, who had been injured abroad, had a blood transfusion and got haemophilia. He then returned to the UK for ongoing treatment, but ended up getting contaminated blood and dying from HIV at the beginning of the 1990s. It is for people such as Colin that we are here today. This is not a partisan issue; it is an issue that we should have dealt with in the past 13 years—it should have been dealt with before that—but let us deal with it now.

[Mr Robinson]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention, which I wholly accept and entirely agree with.