An ex-Government minister said if he'd seen a keen document warning how AIDS was spreading among haemophiliacs by 1983 he would have "pressed the panic button".
Lord John Patten, a former junior minister in the Department of Health who served between 1983 and 1985 said he felt ministers should have a seen a letter from Dr Spence Galbraith urging the withdrawal of US-made blood factor products used to treat haemophilia. There is no evidence this was the case.
But Lord Patten said that the letter from Dr Galbraith - then director of the Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre - would have caused him to act. Speaking at the Infected Blood Inquiry in London, the politician also accepted it was wrong for the Government to be telling haemophiliacs that there risk of contracting AIDS from blood products was "very small" at that time.
