Infected with HIV by the NHS in 1986
1986 was a strange year for me I was eleven; my best friend was a ten year old haemophiliac. 1986 was the year my great grandmother died at the age of 89, my cat that I’d known all my life got run over and my best friend got injected with HIV contaminated blood by the National Health Service at the local children’s hospital. Haemophilia is a condition that restricts your blood from clotting; put simply a small cut would without medication continue to bleed indefinitely, where as in an average human the blood would coagulate and a scab would form. That year we had been riding our skateboards together and my friend had accidently hit a parked car, if it had been me there would have just been some minor bruising but for him this meant a visit to the hospital to stop any internal bleeding. The treatment he received (factor8) was to be ultimately fatal to him.
I remember being told by the adults that my friend had AIDS, this turned out to be not entirely correct, but HIV/AIDS was at the time not very well understood and also at the centre of a massive media storm. I went to visit him at the children’s hospital, it took me 15 minutes to compose myself enough to go into his room and once there I was surprised at how upbeat and normal he was, excited about going to Disneyland and racing around the ward with his brand new state of the art radio controlled car. Looking back now I see them for what they were distractions and consolation prizes. At the time I didn’t understand he would live to see his twenties I expected him to just drop dead in his bed.
Eventually he came home and there was all the stigma and unpleasantness that came with being HIV positive in the 1980’s with some parents disallowing their children from playing with him and questioning whether or not he should be allowed to go to school with the rest of us.
As time passed we saw less and less of each other he moved to the other side of town and went to a different senior school, slowly the weekend visits dwindled and he became like many friends from childhood just that an old friend from childhood. I saw him a couple of times when we were both in our early twenties to some extent he had embraced the drug scene I guess as a form of escapism. The last time I saw him he had lesions on his neck and face. Later I heard he died of a deliberate heroin overdose, I guess that was his way of choosing the nature of his death. I only have to read the Wikipedia page about the infections and illness you get when your immune system collapses to suspect in his position I would have chosen the same thing.
So why write this now? Twenty two years later. I read in the paper this week that over 1200 people were infected with HIV in the 70’s and 80’s in the UK after transfusion of contaminated blood, two thirds of these are now dead, 4800 haemophiliacs were also infected with hepatitis C in the same way. The government has never officially supported any inquiry into this debacle, despite it being considered one the worst health disasters of recent times. On top of this the government has been deliberately withholding documentary evidence from the Archer independent public inquiry, apparently to protect the commercial interests of private companies.
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I remember being told by the adults that my friend had AIDS, this turned out to be not entirely correct, but HIV/AIDS was at the time not very well understood and also at the centre of a massive media storm. I went to visit him at the children’s hospital, it took me 15 minutes to compose myself enough to go into his room and once there I was surprised at how upbeat and normal he was, excited about going to Disneyland and racing around the ward with his brand new state of the art radio controlled car. Looking back now I see them for what they were distractions and consolation prizes. At the time I didn’t understand he would live to see his twenties I expected him to just drop dead in his bed.
Eventually he came home and there was all the stigma and unpleasantness that came with being HIV positive in the 1980’s with some parents disallowing their children from playing with him and questioning whether or not he should be allowed to go to school with the rest of us.
As time passed we saw less and less of each other he moved to the other side of town and went to a different senior school, slowly the weekend visits dwindled and he became like many friends from childhood just that an old friend from childhood. I saw him a couple of times when we were both in our early twenties to some extent he had embraced the drug scene I guess as a form of escapism. The last time I saw him he had lesions on his neck and face. Later I heard he died of a deliberate heroin overdose, I guess that was his way of choosing the nature of his death. I only have to read the Wikipedia page about the infections and illness you get when your immune system collapses to suspect in his position I would have chosen the same thing.
So why write this now? Twenty two years later. I read in the paper this week that over 1200 people were infected with HIV in the 70’s and 80’s in the UK after transfusion of contaminated blood, two thirds of these are now dead, 4800 haemophiliacs were also infected with hepatitis C in the same way. The government has never officially supported any inquiry into this debacle, despite it being considered one the worst health disasters of recent times. On top of this the government has been deliberately withholding documentary evidence from the Archer independent public inquiry, apparently to protect the commercial interests of private companies.
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