Weighing Risks: Policy-Making, Science and the Politics of Contaminated Blood

This paper addresses the question of how policy-makers evaluate and balance the risks posed by cross-border health threats - namely health problems that accompany the people or products that cross increasingly open national borders.  I focus on the process whereby scientific knowledge is generated and integrated into policy decisions.   Using as case-studies the decisions taken in the 1960’s and the subsequent four decades to protect people in the UK against infection with blood-borne hepatitis C (HCV) and HIV, it examines how the structure of the settings for decision-making conditions the outcomes, and how cultural frameworks associated with disease identities affect the relevant decision-making.  It also investigates the interdependence of national and international knowledge communities interested in the blood supply to advance understanding of how national policy decisions are informed by and in turn come to influence international developments.