Medical fury over delaying tactics (From Warrington Guardian)

Medical fury over delaying tactics

3:10pm Thursday 11th February 2010 in News

Michael Kenwright with David Mowat

A HAEMOPHILIAC says he is frustrated after the contaminated blood bill he campaigned relentlessly for was deferred in the House of Commons.

Michael Kenwright, of Grappenhall, desperately wants to get compensation for people infected with blood diseases by the NHS after he was infected with hepatitis dating back to when the Government used to buy blood products from America.

Those products, used to treat his haemophilia, were from donors in prisons and included drug addicts who were paid for their contributions.

Lord Morris of Manchester put forward a private members bill asking for a report, by Lord Peter Archer, on infected blood products.

The report recommended the Government apologises and pays compensation to the victims. In return the Government agreed to pay those with HIV, but not hepatitis.

But the Government said it was not appropriate for the bill to be passed without debate as time had run out before it came up on the order paper and the decision was called by junior whip MP Kerry McCarthy.

Mr Kenwright, of Chester Road, said: “I think what the Government has done is perverse. It is using delaying tactics to keep the bill from being read. They are condemning those that are affected and ill to continue a life of pain and suffering.

“Someone who doesn’t have the morals to let the bill through is not fit to call themselves a human being, let alone honourable.

“Blocking this bill has just proven to me, and many like me, the kind of Government we are now ruled by, and the kind of immoral people who are making the decisions.

“Plans to visit this MP’s constituency for peaceful demonstrations by the victims of this disaster during election campaigning are already being considered.”

The Contaminated Blood (Support for Infected and Bereaved Persons) Bill, signed by 113 MPs from all parties, was supposed to be read in the House of Commons on Friday, following a lobby, attended by those infected and their familes, with the first reading in the House of Lords on Wednesday.

The bill had already gone through the first three stages of the House of Lords and was supported by Conservative Parliamentary candidate for Warrington South, David Mowat.

The bill, which will now be read on February 26, will give legislative effect to all the recommendations of Lord Archer’s two-year inquiry into the contaminated blood disaster, which left 4,670 people with haemophilia infected with HIV and/or hepatitis C.