As a 13-year-old boy, I had cancer, but the treatment I had on NHS ruined my life

IN 1983, 13-year-old Brian Langford was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

- 

When he travelled from his Merthyr valley home to be treated in Llandough Hospital, Penarth, he was given blood transfusions.

Thirty years later, he received a letter saying he had Hepatitis C.

"I didn’t know what it was," Brian admits.

Since then, he’s had treatment for the hepatitis, had liver cancer, and cirrhosis - all linked to his infection. He had to have an ablation - a heat treatment to burn the cancer from his liver - all because of the infected blood he was given.

"That's without everything else I have," explained Brian, before listing just a handful of those other conditions that have changed his life, including heart failure and arthritis.

He is a victim of the infected blood scandal, his life changed and, in his words, "ruined" because he had a disease as a teenager and was unknowingly caught up in what is widely acknowledged to be the biggest treatment disaster in the history of the NHS.

Brian was infected during a scandal that saw more than 30,000 people in the UK, including around 400 in Wales, infected with HIV and hepatitis C after being given contaminated blood products in the 1970s and 1980s. Some 3,000 victims have since died.

There are two main groups affected, haemophiliacs and people with similar conditions - meaning they have a condition that means their blood does not clot and others who were given contaminated blood transfusions after childbirth, surgery or other medical procedures.

In the 1970s, a new treatment for haemophiliacs was found, where donated human blood plasma was developed to replace these clotting agents, but entire batches were contaminated with deadly viruses because blood products were imported from abroad and blood was used from high-risk donors, such as prisoners and drug addicts.