Children used as ‘lab rats’ in clinical trials which gave them hep C and HIV | UK News

Doctors across the UK gave children blood treatments widely known to be contaminated as part of clinical research in the 1970s and 80s, according to a report.

Because of how it was made, only one of the 60,000 donors used to make each batch had to be infected for the entire batch to be contaminated.

According to the BBC, newly unearthed documents reveal there was a ‘secret world of unsafe clinical testing’ using these products.

Haemophilia centres around the country reportedly continued to use blood products after the contamination concerns came to light.

Efforts to then improve blood clotting treatments involved unethical testing practices carried out on sick children, the files show.

Luke’s doctor, a haemophilia expert at Middlesex Hospital, referred him for a trialat another London hospital because he was a ‘virgin haemophiliac’ who had never been treated for his condition before.

Luke told the BBC: ‘I was a guinea pig in clinical trials that could have killed me. There is no other way to explain it – my treatment was changed so I could be enrolled in clinical trials.

‘This change in medication gave me a [potentially] fatal disease – hepatitis C – yet my mother was never even told.’

He was closely monitored but the findings of the trial concluded heat treatment had ‘little or no effect’ in reducing the risk of hepatitis C.

The doctor, who is now dead, told a public inquiry the mother had been informed but acknowledged that ‘standards of consent in the 1980s was quite different to what it is now’.

Luke’s mum said she was ‘absolutely not’ informed and would ‘never ever’ have allowed her son to be used in a trial.

Luke, who has since ben cured, was known to have contracted the disease by the age of 11 but wasn’t told until around four years later.

An entire cohort of haemophiliac boys at a school for vulnerable children were used for a series of trials between 1974 and 1987.

One involved using large quantities of Factor VIII on boys who didn’t need treatment to see if it could preventatively reduce bleeding.

Fellow alumnus Ade Goodyear said: ‘We were treated like lab rats. There was a plethora of studies that we were all enrolled on for the decade we were at the school.’

Pupils who missed injections were reportedly punished by teachers as it risked making the trials ‘flawed’.

A public inquiry into the scandal is in its final stages, and due to produce a concluding report in May.

The exact number of victims of the scandal is hard to determine, but the inquiry has said 1,250 patients were infected with HIV and 2,400 were infected with hepatitis C in the UK.

Around 900 of the HIV patients and 700 of the hepatitis patients are estimated to have died.

Another 8,120 people developed hepatitis C ten years or more after receiving blood transfusions from people (a different treatment to the US-imported Factor VIII products).

The Haemophilia Society believes around 650 victims died after the inquiry was announced in 2017 following years of campaigning by victims.