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: Colin's story

Colin's story

BBC Radio 4 - Blood Matters, Colin's story

The little boy infected with HIV through contaminated blood products when he was just two.

Colin Smith was just two years old when he tested positive for HIV. A haemophiliac, he’d been treated with contaminated Factor VIII blood product.

Colin Smith was a happy, energetic baby despite being diagnosed with the severe bleeding disorder, haemophilia, when he was ten months old. He was treated by doctors in Cardiff with the revolutionary new blood clotting product, known as Factor VIII. 

Imported from the US, Factor VIII was much easier to administer than previous treatments for bleeding disorders. Colin’s parents were able to store the product in the fridge at home and inject their son themselves. 

But when Colin was two, the doctors told his parents that their son had tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes Aids. His subsequent illness and eventual death from Aids in January 1990, aged just seven, devastated the whole family’s lives.

In the fourth episode of her series, Blood Matters, the writer and broadcaster Blanche Girouard, speaks to Colin’s parents, Janet and Colin senior, about coping with having a child infected with HIV - and also with the stigma that that carried. 


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

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