During the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of people with hemophilia in the United Kingdom received Factor VIII, a treatment that helped control the bleeding caused by the disease. The problem was that some of these products had been made using plasma from high-risk donors in the United States. Prisons were among the places the plasma came from.
One of those affected was Colin Smith, who was born with hemophilia A in Wales. He first received Factor VIII when he was about one year old. His parents trusted the doctors treating their son and, according to his mother Janet’s testimony to the British inquiry, no one explained the risks associated with the treatment to them.
When Colin was around two years old, Professor Arthur Bloom told them that the boy had contracted HIV. Janet recalled during the inquiry that they were given the news in a hospital corridor, in front of other patients and family members.
Colin’s health gradually deteriorated. He had pneumonia on two occasions, suffered frequent respiratory infections, and ended up missing school more and more often. His parents even said that other parents threatened to withdraw their children from the school if Colin attended without a private nurse.
In 1988, he began taking AZT, a drug that was then considered a possible source of hope for people with HIV. His mother recalled that Bloom presented it as a kind of “wonder drug”, a medicine that could save his life. But Colin continued to get worse.
At the same time, the family suffered from the enormous stigma associated with HIV during those years. His case was later included in the Infected Blood Inquiry, the British public inquiry established to determine how thousands of people were infected through contaminated blood and blood products. Janet and Colin Smith testified before it in July 2019.
Colin died in January 1990, at just 7 years old. He weighed only 13 pounds, about 5.9 kilos, and his body was severely affected by HIV and hepatitis C. Decades later, his parents still kept the small blue blanket he had been wrapped in when he died. His mother showed it in 2024 and said: “It still smells of him” —”It still smells of him”.
The inquiry into contaminated blood later examined medical decisions, the products used, and the information patients and families were given. Colin’s case thus became one of the most painful testimonies in a scandal that affected thousands of people in the United Kingdom.