Wednesday, 18 Apr, 2007 Health & Fitness

The first hearing began on the case of contaminated blood that was used for treatment of haemophilia patients in Britain.

The program created by NHS, a well-known health services in Britain, was meant to supply haemophiliacs with new blood product but it turned out that blood was infected with HIV and Hepatitis C. More than 2,000 patients infected through contaminated blood died or are reported to be seriously ill.

Newsnight BBC programme disclosed the hidden facts of contaminated blood use. It became known that doctors were using blood of the clotting agent Factor 8 and these supplies were taken from US prisoners. Specialists testing new blood products were neglectful of the danger and used blood from the donors who were infected with dangerous viruses.

The official data to prove the terrible incident disappeared. As the government officials said, documents were deleted or not exposed to the public due to its confidentiality.

From one of the letters it was revealed that warnings on the possible HIV risk from the blood were made by one of the public health surveillance center, but those facts were ignored by Britain's Department of Health.

It was also claimed that haemophiliac patients didn't know about the testing and didn't give their approval to test the blood. Some of them stayed unsuspicious of their HIV positive status for years.

The first hearing is going to take place at Westminster were families of the tragic incident can speak.

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