A report will be submitted into Britain’s infected blood scandal, the country’s worst public health disaster.

LONDON (AP) – British authorities and the country’s public health agency knowingly exposed tens of thousands of patients to deadly infections through contaminated blood and blood products, and kept the truth about the disaster secret for decades. The investigation revealed that the matter had been hidden. UK infected blood scandal Found on Monday.

Between the 1970s and the early 1990s, an estimated 3,000 people in the UK died and many others are thought to have suffered lifelong illnesses from administering blood or blood products contaminated with HIV or hepatitis.

The scandal is widely seen as the worst disaster in British state history. national health service Since its establishment in 1948.

Brian Langstaff, a retired judge who chaired the inquiry, accused successive governments and medical experts of a “consecutive failure” and refusing to accept responsibility in order to save face and costs. He said there was a deliberate attempt to cover up the scandal and that there was evidence that government officials had destroyed documents.

“This disaster was not a coincidence. The infection occurred because those in authority – doctors, blood services, and successive governments – failed to put patient safety first,” he said. “The response of those in power has only exacerbated people’s suffering.”

Chancellor Rishi Sunak apologized to the victims and said the publication of the report was a “shameful day for the British nation”.

Campaigners have been fighting for decades to expose the authorities’ failures and secure government compensation. The inquiry, which was finally approved in 2017, examined evidence from more than 5,000 witnesses and more than 100,000 documents over the past four years.

Many of those affected had hemophilia, which affects the blood’s ability to clot. In the 1970s, patients were given a new treatment that Britain imported from the United States. Some of the plasma used to make the blood products turned out to be from high-risk donors, including prison inmates who were paid to provide blood samples.

Manufacturers of the treatment mixed plasma from thousands of donations, so one infected donor could put the entire batch at risk.

The report said about 1,250 people with bleeding disorders were infected, including 380 children. HIV -Contaminated blood products. Three-quarters of them died. Up to 5,000 other people who received the blood products developed chronic hepatitis C, a type of liver infection.

Meanwhile, an estimated 26,800 people were infected with hepatitis C after receiving blood transfusions, which are often given in hospitals after childbirth, surgery or accidents, the report said.

“I am truly sorry,” Mr Sunak told the packed and silent House of Commons. “Today’s report reveals decades of moral failings at the heart of our national life. At every level, from the NHS to the civil service to ministers in successive governments, we have to trust The people and institutions in charge of it have failed in the most tragic and catastrophic ways.”

He vowed to “correct this historic wrong” and said details of the compensation, expected to total 10 billion pounds ($12.7 billion), would be announced on Tuesday.

The report said many of the deaths and illnesses could have been avoided if governments had taken steps to address the risks associated with blood transfusions and the use of blood products. The report said it has been known since the 1940s and early 1980s that the causes of hepatitis and AIDS, respectively, can be transmitted in this way.

Langstaff said that, unlike a long list of developed countries, British authorities had failed to be rigorous in selecting blood donors and testing blood products. At one school attended by children with hemophilia, public health officials gave the children “multiple higher-risk” treatments as part of the study, the report said.

He said authorities had for years “compounded their suffering by refusing to acknowledge that wrongdoing had taken place and by falsely telling patients that they were receiving the best possible treatment and that blood tests were being introduced early.” he added. When people were found to be infected, authorities were slow to tell people what had happened.

Mr Langstaff said each failure was serious in itself, but taken together they were a “disaster”.

Andy Evans, from the campaign group Tainted Blood, told reporters that he and others had felt like they had been “screaming into the wind for the last 40 years”.

“We have been gaslighted for generations. This report today puts an end to that. We look to the future and say this cannot continue,” he said. said.

Diana Johnson, a lawmaker who has campaigned for victims for many years, said the investigation took so long that some of the key figures may have died afterward, but those found responsible for the disaster were not prosecuted. He said he hopes to see justice, including justice.

“There has to be accountability for the actions taken, even if it was 30, 40, 50 years ago,” she said.

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Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.