The Right Honourable The Lord Ross of Marnock MBE PC Secretary of State for Scotland in the Labour Government of 1974 to 1979.
By Professor John Robertson
In the Guardian today:
A commercial blood product at the centre of the biggest treatment scandal in the history of the NHS was approved for use after government officials were told convicts were among the paid donors and virus contamination “should be assumed”, corporate filings reveal.
The product, given to haemophiliacs to enable their blood to clot, was injected into thousands of patients in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, including young children, who were infected with HIV and hepatitis C.
A single batch could contain plasma from 20,000 donors harvested in US prisons and some of the poorest neighbourhoods of America, where drug use and sexual infections were rife. One infected donation would contaminate the entire batch.
An inquiry headed by Sir Brian Langstaff will report next month on the scandal, which has killed about 3,000 people. He has already concluded “wrongs were done at individual, collective and systemic levels”.
The drug firm Bayer provided 7,000 documents to the inquiry, which reveals its subsidiary, Cutter Laboratories, warned in licensing application documents in the 1970s that its commercial blood product Koate, may contain viruses. It said: “Since the presence or absence of hepatitis virus in Koate concentrate cannot be proven with absolute certainty the presence of such a virus should be assumed.”
The product, known as a factor VIII concentrate, was approved in August 1976 along with similar treatments that were a conduit for deadly viruses for several years.
A government safety committee was told “American state prisons” were among the sources. Studies had shown greater risk of hepatitis infection from prison-harvested blood and the Committee on Safety of Medicines was warned the product “suffers from being prepared from multi-centre donations which cannot be properly controlled by inspection”.
Willie Ross was supposedly a hard man but like any other senior Labour politician in Scotland, throughout history, he cared more for his own career than the people of Scotland and in the Cabinet he was not so hard.
Talking-up Scotland / Scottish media fact checking is like shooting fish in a barrel 
Willie sure earned his place in the HoL ! Another good Labour man – working from the inside to abolish this stain on a democratic nation . How’s that working out ?
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Apologies as this is off topic to your article and yet also to do with The Herald newspaper re an article written by Mark Smith….I found it via a comment on WGD by YesIndyref2 where he archived the piece….it is on The Scottish Greens and it is quite, in parts of the article, a fair and good article……it is entitled “Scottish Greens: Right-wing? Don’t let their little tantrum fool you”….I would say tis a piece more critical of the Scottish Greens leader Patrick Harvie than what is currently doing the rounds just now via most of the media…..as in #SNPBAD
I hope you can look at it….I cannot link onto here as I am a dummy re that but know there are others who can perhaps link it onto here.
It is quite interesting and kind of exposes Mr Harvie’s behaviour as that of someone who tends to lash out at anyone who disagrees with him in him then calling them right wing….which he , Mr Harvie, equates with being what he calls “socially conservative” and which Mark Smith, in this article, disputes and states that does not translate to being right wing as he says in his article “but socially conservative doesn’t necessarily mean right wing”.
NMRN
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Oops sorry I mean to add my comment onto your previous post re the NHS and the American coming to Scotland via The Herald piece….
NMRN
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Thanks
I’ll have a look
John
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