VICTIMS of the contaminated blood scandal have told an inquiry medical records were “destroyed”.
A father fought back tears as he told the Infected Blood Inquiry his teenage son died of AIDS after being infected through treatment for haemophilia, but no hospital medical records exist.
Thousands of patients were infected with HIV and Hepatitis C via contaminated blood products in the 1970s and 1980s, and around 2400 people died.
Giving evidence in Edinburgh, John McDougall said his son Euan and brother-in-law Terry McStay both died of AIDS contracted through blood products used to treat haemophilia. He said Terry was the first haemophilia sufferer to die of AIDS in Scotland and he had warned before he died against using American Factor VIII to treat haemophilia and that “heat treatment was the answer”.
McDougall said medics at Glasgow’s Yorkhill Hospital refused to provide heat-treated products on grounds of cost and efficacy, but within six weeks of Terry’s death began to do so. On attempting to access his son’s medical records, he was told there was no trace of them.
He said: “The hospital records disappeared, and are gone, are destroyed.”
McDougall said he wanted to know why Yorkhill used American Factor VIII when elsewhere in Scotland its use had stopped.
Eileen Dyson was given a blood transfusion aged 29 following the birth of her son in 1988 but was not diagnosed with Hepatitis C until 1994 and given no treatment plan for 14 years. She told the inquiry of her “callous and heartless” treatment by medical staff and how she had to give up her specialised tax work due to the stigma surrounding the virus.
She was later told by Glasgow Royal Infirmary that all her records “had been destroyed” despite having to attend for eight years.
Dyson, who is free of Hepatitis C after treatment in 2015 but expects to need a liver transplant, said around a year ago while being treated in Wishaw General she informed staff of her medical history and was told that was “very unlikely” by workers who “ridiculed” her and “smirked”.
The inquiry continues.
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