[11] I do not consider it to be arguable that the consumer had an actual expectation that blood being supplied to him was not 100% clean, nor do I conclude that he had knowledge that it was, or was likely to be, infected with Hepatitis C. The Defendant's argued that the wording under Article 6 as to how ″all circumstances″ should be taken into account in establishing the level of safety, meant that the court had to consider what steps could reasonably have been expected of the producer, the National Blood Authority, in trying to avoid viral transmission.

In the HIV Haemophilia Litigation, one of two legal issues cited in paragraph 20 of the Advice on Settlement document posed the question as to whether the defendants were negligent in exposing the plaintiffs to the risk of infection historically from hepatitis and whether this would extend to the Department of Health being held liable should the plaintiffs be found to be infected with an unforeseen virus, which in this case, was HIV.

[15] The question came about from material which had been produced by the plaintiff's legal advisors during the proceedings and more specifically from the defendant's discovery which Mr Justice Ognall had permitted the use of in the pending Hepatitis Litigation (A and Others v National Blood Authority and Another), where non-A non-B hepatitis (NANBH) was to become the focus over which precautions should have been taken historically, rather than the "proxy" as it had been in the HIV Haemophilia Litigation.

[16] The late Lord Morris of Manchester, then president of the UK Haemophilia Society,[17] said that the case represented a ″landmark judgement″ that would be of considerable interest to several thousand others who had been infected with hepatitis C as a result of NHS–supplied blood products.

[20] In the same debate, Lord Clement-Jones made the claim that officials of the Parliamentary Under–Secretary of State at the Department of Health had been discretely warning journalists as to the possible implications of the judgment and that it had been reported in The Independent that the NHS could see claims in the region of hundreds of millions if similarly injured consumers were to follow the precedent of this case.