And when grief is compounded by an injustice — an outside factor, a chain of decisions that were morally unlawful — it can become unbearable. I often have to bury the issue of my mum’s contamination with hepatitis C because it hurts too much.
I feel both guilty and conflicted for not standing up for my mum more vocally, especially since she championed so many vulnerable people. I am part of a congregation of heartbroken families who have been subjected to a form of institutional manslaughter or murder. I use the term “murder” because the negligence has continued to knowingly cause harm.
Wellll
The Body Shop founder contracted fatal hepatitis C from a transfusion after giving birth in 1971.
Ah. 1971. Hmm:
In the mid-1970s, Harvey J. Alter, Chief of the Infectious Disease Section in the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, and his research team demonstrated how most post-transfusion hepatitis cases were not due to hepatitis A or B viruses. Despite this discovery, international research efforts to identify the virus, initially called non-A, non-B hepatitis (NANBH), failed for the next decade. In 1987, Michael Houghton, Qui-Lim Choo, and George Kuo at Chiron Corporation, collaborating with Daniel W. Bradley at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, used a novel molecular cloning approach to identify the unknown organism and develop a diagnostic test.[128] In 1988, Alter confirmed the virus by verifying its presence in a panel of NANBH specimens, and Chiron announced its discovery at a Washington, DC Press conference in May 1988.
In 1971 we – as a species – didn;t even know of the existence o9f hepatis C. Let alone have a test or anything.
It’s really a bit over the top – de trop even – to be calling this institutional murder you know….
(paywalled can’t read)
It took 36 years to kill her ?
But when we DID know, what steps were taken by the NHS..?
“morally unlawful “
WTF?
Lawful/Unlawful
or
Moral/Immoral
Morally unlawful means “lawful but I don’t agree, change the law retrospectively to suit just me. waaaaa!”
Stopped reading at that point.
I won’t be around to see it, but this will pale into insignificance when the covid shit hits the fan……..
Ottokring, here it is: https://archive.ph/Rj5ax
We could speculate whether her mother would have accepted a blood transfusion even if she had known the risk since, as the article says she “risked death if she refused the transfusion while haemorrhaging”. Maternal deaths were around 1.7 per 10,000 births at the time in England and Wales.
We could also speculate whether her mother would have refused to have been transfused with blood that had been tested for hepatitis C, had that been possible at the time, as the test was developed using deliberately infected chimpanzees.
And not 30 years after the discovery, there is a curative therapy available for it.
A curative therapy for a virus. Let that sink in.
Ottokring, yes, that’s fairly typical kill time for any non-congenital liver disease, howsoever inflicted.