http://new.edp24.co.uk/content/news/...A18%3A30%3A047
Warning of blood disease epidemic
STEVE DOWNES
10 February 2006
06:30
Fears of a blood disease epidemic deepened as a family told how a much-loved Norfolk farmer's life ebbed away, decades after an infected transfusion.
Gerald Chubbock died of liver cancer on Christmas Day 2000 - six years after he was told he had hepatitis C.
Doctors believe the 70-year-old contracted the virus in the 1970s through a blood transfusion during either a pancreatitis operation or a hip replacement - both carried out at the old Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.
His grieving family has been quietly looking for answers from health officials since 2000, but has now made the issue public after reading about Stuart Oliver in the EDP last month.
Mr Oliver, a 47-year-old Cambridge-shire businessman, died of cancer and chronic liver disease last year - weeks after being told he had contracted hepatitis C from a blood transfusion in 1987.
The illnesses that killed Mr Chubbock and Mr Oliver are strongly linked to hepatitis C.
The two men are among potentially tens of thousands of people infected in the 1970s, before health officials had identified hepatitis C. It is thought that many of those could still be completely unaware that they are infected.
Mr Chubbock's widow Gwendoline, from Wayford Bridge, near Stalham, said her husband had blood transfusions during an operation for pancreatitis in 1975 and a hip replacement in 1978.
He was diagnosed with hepatitis C in January 1994 during blood screening before an operation to have his other hip replaced.
She said: "We were a bit worried, but didn't know much about it. He had various biopsies, including a liver biopsy. He became gradually very poorly. They tried to treat him with a new drug. But he was still so tired and generally unwell. It affected his life tremendously."
Mrs Chubbock added: "He had always been an active farmer with a farm at Waxham, but he retired in 1989 because of his health - even though we didn't know then about the hepatitis C. It was probably down to that, despite us not knowing. On March 29, 2000, he was diagnosed with liver cancer, which is linked to hepatitis C. He died on Christmas Day 2000."
Mrs Chubbock said she was "very angry" that her husband had been given infected blood - and gone almost 20 years without knowing.
"I don't think anyone who hasn't suffered from this realises what you go through with people who have.
"It alters your way of life completely. Gerald didn't like people to see him because he looked so frail. But before the illness he was a strong man.
"I'm quite sure, knowing the kind of chap he was, that he would still be here if it hadn't been for the blood transfusion."
Mr and Mrs Chubbock's daughter Jane Ransom hit out at health officials, and said she suspected that someone knew about hepatitis C long before it was officially discovered in 1988.
She said: "People have a right to have clean blood. How many are affected by this? It must be thousands."
Charles Gore, chief executive of the Hepatitis C Trust, said: "Thousands and thousands and thousands of people will die unless we do something now. A huge store of trouble is being built up. We are currently diagnosing 8000 new cases per year. We need to be diagnosing 40,000 per year."
He added: "These are just two incidences of something that's becoming more widespread. What concerns me desperately is the apparent lack of urgency on the part of the Department of Health. The public awareness campaign is so low-key that it's having no effect.
"In the first nine months since the campaign was launched in December 2004, there has been no increase in the rate of new diagnoses. People are going to continue to die preventably and needlessly."
Mrs Ransom, from Walcott, near North Walsham, criticised the Department of Health's "compensation" scheme, which does not extend to the dependants of those who died from hepatitis C from infected blood transfusions.
She said: "I find it very discriminating. Compensation is immaterial, though. We could be offered the world, but it wouldn't bring back a much-loved, much-missed husband, dad and granddad."
North Norfolk MP Norman Lamb has taken up the family's case.
In a letter to Mr Lamb in April 2004, Melanie Johnson, the then public health minister, said: "The payments are not designed to compensate for bereavement, although I fully appreciate the hardship and pain experienced by families who cared for loved ones who have died.
"I realise that this is little consolation, but hope that you can understand that the health care budget is not unlimited."
Andrew Stronach, head of communications at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, pointed out that hepatitis C was only discovered in May 1988 - at least a decade after Mr Chubbock's infected transfusion.
He said: "Only after hepatitis C was identified was it possible to develop a test, then a screening process."
The first reliable test was first available in Britain in September 1991.
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