Former top official will have to give evidence
THE inquiry will for the first time compel Government officials to account for their role in the scandal.
Dr Diana Walford, who was a senior official at the then-Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) in the early 1980s, is likely to be called to give evidence.
Dr Walford, who rose to become the Government’s deputy chief medical officer, was at a meeting of the blood transfusion research committee in June 1981, where she was told cases of hepatitis were already being seen among patients treated with clotting products.
Yet it was five years, at least, before supplies were stopped. Minutes of the meeting report: ‘Approximately 40-50 cases were reported per year out of a total of just over 2,000 patients who were treated with Factor VIII, IX concentrate or cryoprecipitate.’
The officials present were so convinced that patients given the products would be infected by what would soon be known as hepatitis C, that they proposed using them as trial subjects to develop a blood test for the problem.
The minutes say: ‘The DHSS were keen that a prospective study of patients undergoing elective treatment requiring concentrate should be undertaken... to provide a collection of well documented sera and other specimens for use in the development of serological for non-A, non-B hepatitis.’
Dr Walford refused to discuss her recollections of the meeting when approached by the Mail this month. Speaking at her £1.5million home in London, Dr Walford, who is now 73, said: ‘I will not be drawn into discussing it.’
In 2010 and 2011 she also twice refused to give evidence to Scotland’s official investigation into the scandal, insisting ‘the passage of time’ meant she was ‘not in a position to assist the inquiry’. Dr Walford had a glittering career before she was awarded a CBE and given the role of Principal of Mansfield College in Oxford.