It is 1984 and I am despatched to Chandler’s Ford to track down a family who were thought to have been affected by the newly breaking news that people with haemophilia had contracted HIV, the precursor to AIDS.  Their son was regularly injected with Factor 8 - a substance made from blood plasma that makes blood clot.  Most of us generate our own Factor 8. Haemophiliacs do not.  For parents told that their child has a Factor 8 deficiency it’s devastating.  A son can never play football for fear of sustaining an injury that will bleed – externally if you are lucky so it can be seen, internally  if you’re not so lucky. Girls are less severely affected. Growing children have to learn to curb their natural exuberance for fear of what might happen.

Imagine, then, if you’re told your child has contracted HIV as well,  but no one can tell you why,  at a time when all anyone knew about HIV/AIDS was that that it would probably kill your child and there was no known cure.  The family weren’t answering their phone and the thought was they might answer the door to me, a familiar six o’clock TV face.   As it turned out, they did, and invited me in, but not before I witnessed at first hand why they had shut themselves away and drawn the curtains in broad daylight.

As I walked down their quiet cul-de-sac someone was cutting their hedge.

“Is this where the so and so’s live?”

“I hope you’ve come to get them moved on.  They can’t stay here. Their kid’s got AIDS.  We’ve spoken to the council about it.”

Hampshire Chronicle: Khalid Aziz

Hard to imagine nearly forty years on, but such was the fear of the then unknown so-called “gay plague.”

I settled on the family’s sofa with their glum, hapless 6 -year-old only child, cause of the family’s pariah status, sat opposite.   They explained how his health had been deteriorating, with symptoms very different to that which he had previously experienced.  They had been reassured by their paediatrician that there had been no change in his medication and his regular injections were all normal as before.

Now you may, rightly, want me to explain why I was pursuing this tragic family just for the titillation of 6pm viewers of Coast to Coast.  Well, we had got wind there was a bigger picture here and the Chandler’s Ford family were not alone. These were pre-internet days, and, unlike Post Office sub-postmasters, they had no way of knowing about, let alone contacting other sufferers.  If they could tell their story on camera it might start to shake things up.  They did.  And on the back of their story, we could talk about how their child had come to contract HIV/AIDS.

With the establishment of the NHS, other health related services had burgeoned, not least of these the Blood Transfusion Service.  In true British tradition, people volunteered a pint of their blood every three months in return for nothing more than a smile of thanks from the nurse, a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Enter some bright spark in the NHS who decided that it would be more efficient (cheaper) to buy in blood products from abroad, particularly the USA.  Here, in their largely private health system, people didn’t volunteer; they wanted to be paid for their blood.  It used to be the way injecting drug addicts funded their next hit.  Sharing needles, they were vulnerable to picking up hepatitis and, as it turned, out HIV too.  Prisoners, another high-risk group for similar reasons, also contributed their infected blood.

You didn’t need a 5-year inquiry to tell you it was a bonkers decision and the even more heinous cover up, a travesty.  No heads will roll as a result.  “It was so long ago”.  Someone will doubtless say, “Lesson will be learned.”  I bet they won’t.