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: Doctor knows best

Doctor knows best

BBC Radio 4 - Blood Matters, Doctor knows best

Why some haemophilia patients were not told for years that they'd been infected with HIV.

Some patients with haemophilia were kept in the dark for years about the risks from US-made Factor VIII blood clotting products. We ask doctors how this could have happened.

Later this year, the Infected Blood Inquiry will publish its final report. In the third episode of her series, the writer and broadcaster Blanche Girouard looks at the role of doctors in what has become known as the worst scandal in the history of the NHS.

“It was a different era,” one doctor who worked in a large busy haemophilia centre in London in the 1970s and 80s, tells Blanche. “The culture was very different, we doctors were in a sense kings,” another former senior haemophilia specialist says. 

Blanche also hears from one couple who were told by doctors to give up any plans to have children after the husband, a haemophilia sufferer, was infected with HIV-contaminated Factor VIII.


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

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