Question: Do you know anything about the contaminated blood scandal

Ditte Hedegaard answered on 18 Jun 2014:

Do you mean the contaminated blood scandal in England?

I’ve heard about it, but I don’t know much about the details. Unfortunately, some people got infected with hepatitis C viruses from receiving contaminated blood at the hospitals. Hepatitis C virus was not discovered until 1989 and it was not until 1991 that the NHS started testing blood for hepatitis C virus. Patients that have received blood before 1991, may therefore have been infected with hepatitis C virus when they received their treatment. It is really unfortunate that these cases happen and we should always try to avoid them, but unfortunately doctors cannot guarantee that the blood is 100% free from viruses. A lot of the viruses out there have not yet been discovered so we can’t test the blood, when we don’t know what we are looking for. Having sad that, there is only a small risk of getting a virus infection from blood since the NHS is really good at testing it several times before it is used, so I believe it is worth the risk.

A lot of scientists are working on discovering new viruses. Recently scientists around the world got together to investigate viruses in bats. Bats often have a lot of viruses and some of them might start infecting humans in the future, because we now know which viruses the bats have we know what we potentially have to look for in humans.