Thousands of Brits Given Tainted Blood

(United Kingdom) It's reported that thousands of British hemophiliacs were exposed to HIV and/or hepatitis C contaminated blood and blood products after the National Health Service (NHS) ignored warnings about using hemophiliacs to test out new blood products.

Public hearings were initiated after a BBC Newsnight program exposed what has been called "the worst treatment disaster in the history of the National Health Service."

The programme claimed that from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, 4,500 haemophiliacs in the United Kingdom were exposed to lethal viruses through blood products designed to help them.

Newsnight disclosed that many haemophiliacs became infected from supplies of the clotting agent Factor 8 from abroad, and unknown to them at the time, much of the plasma came from donors like prison inmates in the US who were allowed to sell their blood even though there were questions about their health.

The programme said that many official documents had "mysteriously disappeared", although the Government claimed some were shredded and others had not been released on grounds of commercial confidentiality.

Almost 2,000 infected individuals have died and many more are terminally ill and struggling for financial support.

This case demonstrates just one problem with having a bureaucratic, socialized medical care system. Decades can pass before it becomes known how thousands of people were killed or made sicker.

Bureaucracies, devoid of any meaningful bedside manner, view patients as names on pieces of paper. And if the pieces of paper are ignored or disappear, so do the patients. Because of the aforementioned and other socialist schemes, America should never give Hillary Clinton the clicker.