‘They wouldn’t touch a bottle I had touched’: Blood scandal victims were treated like ‘lepers’

Danielle Mullan holds a picture of her mother Marie Cromie, at her family home in south Belfast, after the publication of the Infected Blood Inquiry report. Marie Cromie found out she had hepatitis C in 2005 and died on July 4, 2023. Photograph: Pacemaker

“It very quickly went around the school – there was a stigma because no one knew enough about it,” she says. The vast report found a “catalogue of failures” amounting to a “calamity” in which 30,000 patients “suffered miserably” after being infected with HIV and hepatitis C as a result of being treated with contaminated blood between the 1970s and early 1990s.Marie Cromie received an infected blood transfusion after giving birth to her son in 1981. Photograph: Danielle Cromie/PA

“Not in the sense of a handful of people plotting in an orchestrated conspiracy to mislead, but in a way that was more subtle, more pervasive and more chilling in its implications,” Langstaff wrote. “She was a lollipop lady who loved her family and grandchildren, she was so funny and one of the most caring people. No matter what her own problems were or circumstances, she was always thinking about other people.

Ahead of watching the live coverage on the inquiry’s YouTube page on Monday, Mullan insists she and other campaigners “always knew it was a cover-up”. The head of a support group for haemophiliacs in the North said what happened in the South acted as a “driver” in their campaign for truth after he and his twin brother learned they had hepatitis C from infected blood.

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