Mother ‘wasn’t told son, 3, was used in tainted blood trial’
‘Treated with disrespect’
A BOy of three contracted hepatitis C when doctors used him in a clinical trial without his mother’s consent, a public inquiry heard yesterday.
Luke O’Shea Phillips was given tainted blood in 1985 to see whether he developed the illnesses other haemophiliacs suffered following transfusions. Four years later, tests showed he had been infected and doctors tried to convince his mother Shelagh that she had agreed to the trial.
The inquiry into tainted blood imported from the US was told that by the mid-1980s thousands of patients had been infected with HIV and hepatitis. And as the NHS looked at ways to make the products safe, Mr O’Shea Phillips was chosen to take part in a pharmaceutical trial on heattreated blood.
As a mild haemophiliac, his mother had taken him to Middlesex Hospital in London with minor bleeding after a fall.
He was given the new product without being told of the risks.
In a letter, copied in to pharmaceutical company Alpha Therapeutics, his consultant described him as a ‘virgin haemophiliac’ who was given ‘alpha heat treated Factor VIII’, the tainted blood product.
The toddler’s medical records were stamped with ‘Danger of Infection’ and doctors began to monitor him for the transmission of a range of deadly diseases including HIV.
Miss O’Shea, 59, a head teacher, said she had no knowledge her son, who is now a 37year-old father of one and BBC executive, was being used in a trial.
‘With an innocent child of three and a half I would not have considered such action. I would never ever have allowed my child to be part of a trial,’ she told the inquiry which resumed in London yesterday.
Speaking of the impact of the infection, which has been cleared, Mr O’Shea Phillips said: ‘As a child I’ve gone into hospital with a non-life threatening bleed and I have come out with a life threatening disease.
‘Somewhere down the line someone had seen me as so irrelevant that they can do that to me. When you are treated with that much disrespect by NHS doctors, you feel like you are worthless – utterly worthless.’
Miss O’Shea said medical records showed that the diagnosis was kept from the family for four years, until 1997.
Doctors then tried to cover up their mistakes by ‘gaslighting’ her, manipulating her into doubting her own sanity, she said.
But a note in her son’s medical records mentions his hepatitis C diagnosis and adds: ‘Patient and family unaware at present – 14 October 1993.’
She said she had been left in shock when it was first mentioned to her in passing in a letter in 1997 that she needed to attend an appointment because her son had hepatitis C.