The Ten Most Deplorable Acts
Committed Against UK Haemophiliacs

 Definition: “Deplorable”: deserving strong condemnation, shockingly bad, (in the sense to 'weep for, regret deeply'), Oxford Dictionary, 2001.
   
 

0. Deliberately targeting and exposing babies and young children to blood products known to be contaminated with Hepatitis B & C (non-A non-B hepatitis), and even, in certain appalling cases, HIV.  
    
0. Non-consensual testing and research, including ensuring that certain haemophiliac patients were deliberately exposed to Hepatitis, and even accelerating their acquisition of the AIDS agent by prematurely bringing them into contact with known infective products.
    
0. Withholding positive test results, putting partners of haemophiliacs at risk, and unnecessarily delaying the implementation of Hepatitis C testing and screening.
    
0. Consistently and continually ignoring direct and specific warnings about the safety of imported plasma concentrates derived from paid donors.  Failing to ban all US imports of commercial pharmaceutical company's blood products from the earliest receipt of the warnings and failing to protect UK haemophiliacs from what has clearly been a death sentence. 
    
0. Diverting money intended for self-sufficiency to ‘other causes’, failing to comprehend the difference between self-sufficiency and maximum capacity, underestimating the growing demand for plasma products, grossly under-investing in industry standards, failing to implement plasmapheresis of voluntary donors, and careless licensing; resulting in mass loss of life.
    
0. Deliberately passing on, off-loading or 'dumping' non-heat-treated American plasma products to other countries, whilst back in the UK, knowingly importing contaminated stock and even indemnifying the pharmaceutical companies over the known serious risks of using the products on UK patients; even after they were banned by the FDA in the USA.
    
0. Using human beings, often infants, in comparative infectivity studies with animal models involving chimpanzees, and exposing human beings to dangerous in vivo infectivity studies whilst casually considering humans as test subjects alongside primates such as owl monkeys, marmosets and chimpanzees.
    
0. Knowingly sourcing and buying blood from 'skid row' donors and 'high risk' prisoners, for harvesting blood from those who had been exposed to hepatitis in order to obtain valuable antibodies and antigens for research, and for shipping falsely labelled blood that had been extracted from cadavers. [1]
    
0. Putting a price on the life of a haemophiliac: “those who are already doomed will generate savings which more than cover the cost of testing blood donations." [2]
    
0. Failure by successive Governments to admit liability, and following that, offer adequate compensation.