‘Plasma Was Called Liquid Gold’: The True Story of Britain’s Contaminated Blood Scandal
On a former slave owner’s cotton plantation in Arkansas, Cummins’ sprawling state farm prison covers 6,700 hectares (16,500 acres) and houses nearly 1,900 inmates.
It is a working farm with vegetable crops, a dairy and livestock, but for more than twenty years the most lucrative product was the blood plasma taken from the convicts.
Prisoners were paid between $5 and $7 each time, and the plasma was sold into the pharmaceutical industry supply chain for around $100 from the early 1960s to the early 1980s.
Cummins was part of a network of prisons across America that supplied plasma and its extracts in products shipped around the world, including Britain. Other paid donors were recruited from underserved areas of the US, including drug addicts and people with sexual diseases.
Cara McGoogan, author of The Poison Line: a true story of death, deception and infected blood, said: “The plasma was so profitable that it was called liquid gold. From prisons in America to Great Britain, mistakes have been made all along the chain that have led to this deadly product.”
Shocking stories have been revealed about the ‘bleeders’ who donated to Cummins. It was stated that there were no sinks in the bleeding area, no clinical scrubs or gloves. The bleeding rooms were dirty with blood on the floor. It is alleged that screening procedures were regularly ignored.
There were even more horrific claims at another prison in Louisiana. One witness claimed to have seen people ‘shooting intravenous drugs’ as they waited to donate, while others reportedly had sex in the bathroom before ‘getting on the table to bleed’.
Clotting agents extracted from plasma have been used to treat people in Britain suffering from haemophilia, a medical condition in which the blood’s ability to clot is severely reduced.
Normally, about 10,000 donors would have contributed to a batch of product, from inmates in a chain of prisons in the American South to the homeless in Los Angeles. Just one person infected with HIV or hepatitis C can contaminate the entire product.
The research into infected blood in London, which opened in 2018 and has heard from 370 witnesses and examined tens of thousands of documents, will report next month on the worst treatment scandal in the history of the NHS. More than 3,000 people have died from the dirty blood contaminated with HIV and hepatitis viruses.
Ministers continued to insist for years that patients had received the “best available treatment” at the time. They claimed that doctors and health officials did not have the knowledge to prevent the tragedy.
The Observer has seen documents submitted to the inquiry debunking this claim, showing that British officials were told in the 1970s that blood plasma came from convicts and could not be properly controlled.
One of the products was Koate, manufactured by Cutter Laboratories, owned by drug manufacturer Bayer. Cutter Laboratories had been a major customer of the plasma trafficked by the Cummins prison since the 1960s.
Drug executives were candid about the risks they posed application for a license in October 1975 from British regulators. It said: “Since the presence or absence of the hepatitis virus in Koate cannot be proven with absolute certainty, the presence of a virus must be assumed.”
‘must be adopted’.
Officials from the UK Medicines Safety Commission were also told that the “raw material” came from several sources, including “American State Prisons”.
Officials should have realized that paid convicts were more likely to be drug users and at risk of infection, but the permit was granted by the then Ministry of Health and Social Security.
“It is horrifying that the government knew these products were contaminated and that the donors included prisoners, but they were licensed without people obtaining informed consent,” the spokesperson said. Jason Evans, founder of the Factor 8 campaign group, whose father Jonathan died in October 1993 after contracting HIV and hepatitis C from infected blood. “The licensing documents are crucial because they demonstrate the level of knowledge within the government.”
Hemophilia is an inherited bleeding disorder caused by low levels of clotting proteins known as factor VIII (the most common deficiency associated with hemophilia A) and factor IX. It is mainly a male disease.
The condition was treated for many years with intravenously administered fresh frozen plasma, but by the early 1970s manufacturers were able to extract the proteins from the pooled plasma, producing a freeze-dried powder concentrate for soluble injection.
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Commercial protein products were considered a ‘miracle cure’, but there was a shortage of blood plasma. The World Health Organization urged countries to become self-sufficient in blood supplies and avoid paid donors due to the higher risk of infected blood. Dr. Joseph Garrott Allen, an American doctor, warned the British Blood Products Laboratory in January 1975 that the American supply chain with paid donors was “extremely dangerous.”
Despite the warning, Britain began licensing commercial factor VIII products from the early 1970s. The contaminated product led to outbreaks of hepatitis B in hemophiliacs in the 1970s, but doctors believed the benefits of the treatment outweighed the risks.
In January 1983 the Observer reported that the products could be a conduit for a much deadlier virus: HIV. “A commercial blood product imported into Britain from the United States could pose a serious threat to the health of hemophiliacs,” the newspaper reported.
Four months later the Post on Sunday warned in a front-page article about “hospitals using murderous blood”, rightly warning that the lives of thousands of Britons could be at risk.
Cutter Laboratories had begun screening its donors in February 1983 because of the risk of AIDS, but British ministers, doctors and health officials continued to insist there was no conclusive evidence of risk and failed to stop the treatments.
In November 1983, Kenneth Clarke, then Health Minister, told Parliament that there was no “conclusive evidence” that Aids was transmitted through blood products. The contaminated products were not phased out until 1985, when heat-treated products were introduced.
Over the years, as the scale of the disaster became clear, ministers have been accused of making the tragedy worse by failing to acknowledge the failures. Campaigners say the destruction of documents and misleading statements amounted to a cover-up. Documents also show that doctors experimented on children with hemophilia with treatments that could infect them with HIV.
The Infected Blood Inquiry, chaired by Sir Brian Langstaff, investigated how 30,000 people became infected with HIV and hepatitis C. Patients were infected by commercial blood products for haemophilia and blood transfusions that were not routinely screened for hepatitis C before September 1991. The genetic sequence of hepatitis C, previously known as “non-A, non-B” hepatitis, was isolated in 1989.
An interim report published in July 2022 recommended that interim compensation payments of not less than £100,000 should be paid to all those infected and all surviving relatives. In a second interim report from April 2023, Langstaff found that “mistakes have been made at individual, collective and systemic levels”.
The government says it has paid out more than £400 million in interim compensation but cannot make a final decision on further payouts until it sees the report.
Bayer said it has fully cooperated with the investigation into contaminated blood. The company said in a statement: “Bayer expresses its deepest condolences to people who contracted HIV or hepatitis infections through the use of blood therapies in the 1970s and 1980s and to the family members of those who became infected.
“Bayer truly regrets that this tragic situation has occurred and that therapies developed by Bayer Group companies and prescribed by physicians to save and improve lives ultimately caused so much suffering.”