An estimated 1820 people died in the UK after being given contaminated blood transfusions between 1970 and 1991, a report by the Infected Blood Inquiry has found.
The report’s authors estimated that 26,800 people, potentially more, were probably infected with hepatitis C after being given the donated blood during childbirth or a hospital operation. The modelling for the public inquiry estimated that between 21,300 and 38,800 people were infected after being given a transfusion between 1970 and 1991, with a central estimate of 26,800.
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‘This has been a particularly challenging area to investigate as the data, when available, tend to suffer from many of the issues laid out above and so any numerical conclusions we draw are necessarily cautious and approximate,’ said the report’s authors.
‘For HIV and vCJD infections, and for people with bleeding disorders, we can actually count cases of interest from databases, although even then we acknowledge possible incompleteness.’
The inquiry’s findings were based on the rate of hepatitis C infection in the population, the number of blood donations made over that time, the survival rate of the disease and other factors. It found at least 79 and possibly up to 100 people also contracted HIV through donated blood, based on data provided by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), with most infections between 1985 and 1987.
‘We provide no measures of illness, psychological distress, financial harms, family stress, and the many other ways in which infected blood will have damaged lives. In particular, we do not attempt to estimate onward-transmission to partners, children or others,’ added the report’s authors.
‘We hope that readers will recognise our understanding that, beneath all the counts and measurements, there are individual human lives. But it is only by summarising all those experiences into bald numbers that we can properly assess the magnitude of what has happened.’