Blood Matters

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Factual: Health & Wellbeing

Blanche Girouard explores the UK's contaminated blood scandal of the 1970s and 1980s.

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Blood Matters: The wonder drug

The wonder drug

BBC Radio 4 - Blood Matters, The wonder drug

A revolutionary treatment promises new hope for haemophilia sufferers and their families.

When a new treatment for blood disorders reaches the UK, haemophilia patients and their doctors welcome the ‘wonder drug’. But soon they are proven horribly wrong.

During the 1970s and 80s thousands of people in the UK who were suffering from haemophilia received a revolutionary treatment to stop them from bleeding. The new blood product, known as Factor VIII, was imported from the US and could be administered much more conveniently than previous NHS treatments. 

“It was a miracle,” recalls Andy Evans who was started on Factor VIII in 1981, at the age of three. But no one told Andy’s parents, or the families of other children with haemophilia, that the US product carried a potentially deadly health risk. 

Later this year, the Infected Blood Inquiry, set up by the then Prime Minister Theresa May to look at the circumstances that led to thousands of NHS patients being given contaminated blood and blood products, will release its final report. 

In this first episode of Blood Matters, the broadcaster and writer Blanche Girouard hears from two men, both haemophiliacs, whose lives were dramatically changed by Factor VIII.


Producer: Mike Lanchin 
Researcher: Ewan Newbigging-Lister 
Editor: Kristine Pommert
A CTVC production for BBC Radio 4

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