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Outlook: My children were injected with HIV

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Matthew and Simon Merry

05/06/2019 GMT

My children were injected with HIV

BBC World Service - Outlook, My children were injected with HIV

Jennifer Merry’s haemophiliac sons were infected by contaminated blood in a UK hospital

When Jennifer Merry took her haemophiliac children to the hospital, she wanted to find a cure for them. She said "they were given death instead".

Jennifer Merry’s sons – Matthew and Simon – were born with haemophilia, a genetic condition that means a person’s blood doesn’t clot properly. Matthew and Simon had to get a treatment to survive: for years, they were injected with a blood-clotting protein taken from donated and purchased blood. In 1985 Jennifer received shocking news: the blood her children were injected with was contaminated with HIV. Matthew, Simon and thousands of others in the UK became the victims of what has been called the worst treatment disaster in the history of Britain’s National Health Service. 

Harvey Pratt is a Native American artist who became a pioneer of a technique called 'soft tissue post-mortem drawing'. For the past fifty years, Harvey has been using his artistic skills to reconstruct disfigured bodies and help with forensic investigations. Harvey is also a painter and a sculptor and he has designed the National Native American Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. 

The Okavango Delta in Botswana is a huge inland river delta in the north of the country which floods seasonally. It's full of hippos, elephants, giraffes - and baobab trees. They can live for up to 3,000 years and grow to 100 feet tall and 40 feet wide. Motswasele Tshosa is a local tour guide who looks after them. 

(Image: Matthew and Simon Merry. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Merry.)

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