A haemophiliac who was given contaminated blood has spoken about the “colossal harm” the scandal has caused as he demanded “proper compensation” for those affected.
Bruce Norval, who contracted hepatitis C, said he had been left “totally and utterly disappointed” by a report into what happened.
The Penrose Inquiry, which was set up by the Scottish Government, spent years probing events in the 1970s and 1980s when hundreds of people in Scotland were given contaminated blood by the NHS.
Patients, many of whom had haemophilia, became infected with hepatitis C and HIV from the contaminated blood and products which should have helped to treat them.
One of the most shocking cases concerns a baby who was was infected with HIV after a blood transfusion at Ninewells Hospital.
The case of ‘Luke’, whose life was ruined by contracting the disease, was one of three Dundee incidents cited in the report.
Luke was born by caesarean at Ninewells in the mid-1980s but he was given a blood transfusion after suffering from medical complications.
His health improved and he was discharged but some months later GPs told his “devastated” mother that he had contracted the potentially life-threatening infection.
Prime Minister David Cameron and Scottish Health Secretary Shona Robison apologised to victims after the report (PDF link) found that more should have been done to screen blood and donors for hepatitis C in the early 1990s and said the collection of blood from prisoners should have stopped earlier.
* For more on this story, see Friday’s Courier
Mr Cameron confirmed £25 million of funding to improve financial support for the NHS patients who were infected with hepatitis C and HIV during the 1970s and 1980s.
Mr Norval, who believes he was given infected blood when he was three years old, said more needed to be done.
He insisted the victims and their families were suffering “ongoing harm” and needed support as well as financial compensation.
Mr Norval told BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme: “There are ongoing problems for victims’ families, even where the victim has died years earlier.
“This is ongoing harm that has been created by the lack of psychiatric and fiscal support for families who are left desperate in the wake of deaths from HIV and hepatitis.”
He insisted: “Yes, the politicians should deal with it – there’s no reason for them to compound a bad report with bad political decisions.
“But … if Penrose was to remain credible to victims, there should have been at least some acknowledgement of the colossal harm that has been caused by the secrecy around people’s HIV and by the lack of anybody to talk to for families that are isolated, dying of diseases over periods of decades.”
Mr Norval said he became sick with hepatitis C when he was 15, and was “probably infected when I was three”.
He told how the disease has impacted on his health, saying: “I have become unable to work, I feel nothing but pain, I have no sense of touch, I live with cancer checks every six months, I suffer from regular exhaustion, gastric upset. I don’t go through a single day when I am not significantly unwell.”
He said Nicola Sturgeon, who pressed for an inquiry while the SNP was in opposition had “kept her word” by instigating the inquiry after the SNP came to power at Holyrood.
But he added: “I would like to see her now show the courage of her convictions and actually set forward to bring about proper compensation for victims in the way that she represented us in opposition.”
He also stressed that victims needed more than financial compensation.
Mr Norval said: “Money would be good, but there is also the need for psychiatric support, there’s the need to go out and find out what state some people are in. Some people, through the use of the HIV drugs and the hep C drugs, have become unwell just through those things. We’ve got guys who are dependent on ageing and ailing families and who need to be assessed for care needs.
“We need to get out and stop people being punished beyond the obvious impacts of disease for being victims of this disaster.”