Health committee  It is a very tough business dealing with applications from people who believe their disability, their damage, is caused by thalidomide, and I, unfortunately, have had to say no to almost 600 such people. But in none of those cases did I think there was any room for doubt that tha

Health committee  I'm sorry, I'm not sure of your terminology. We had a committee led by a High Court judge that included patient advocates, legal experts, and medical experts evaluating the medical report, having already passed through a process of increasing the probability of the individual's

Health committee  No. There were a couple of claims in the 1990s that this had happened, but what it really pointed to was the defects of the original diagnosis, whereby people with genetic phenocopy patterns that looked like thalidomide effects but were not went on to have children, basically pro

Health committee  It was dealt with before my time, but there were, I think, 12 cases of children born in 1963, so there were pharmacists, and so on, who hadn't cleared the drugs out when they were supposed to.

Health committee  There were two cases of those born in 1965 that we class as “bathroom cabinet accidents”, where people had not realized that the bottle of tablets that said “to be taken as advised” was actually thalidomide. In each of those cases, I'm assured, the actual tablets were produced. O

Health committee  I think the person who you took on in the late sixties and early seventies who advised on a lot of Canadian cases was Dr. Newman. He told me he had spent time in Canada looking at your cases for you. I don't know how many, but he has certainly been around.

Health committee  Yes, I can, but you've gone fairly quiet at this end. I don't know what's happened with the audio, but the audio level seems to have dropped.

Health committee  To the best of my knowledge, they have all found a clinical medical expert with long experience in the particular subject. Austria has recently established a scheme, with a government panel advised by a professor of genetics, and the Germans have their Contergan Foundation, which

Health committee  Around the world, there is still a lot of current experience. What's happening, as in the U.K., is that the long-established expert is transferring the knowledge and training up an apprentice. However, to be an apprentice in this, you seem to be a professor of genetics to start w

Health committee  Yes. Dr. Newman had a kind of scale with something like 25 points. Most of the ones that he recommended would be well over 20 out of 25 on that scale. The challenge comes, though, that there are always other possibilities. There was one person born in the middle 1970s who was st

Health committee  Yes. They had an ear deformity pattern that was very definite. The bilateral radial aplasia, the arm reductions with the radial club-hands, is very rare outside thalidomide. The balance of probability is that, if somebody is born in a period when thalidomide is available and pres

Health committee  I must caution you that I'm not a medical doctor and that I'm doing it from observation, not from clinical expertise. Of the candidates we saw, the 600 that I mentioned, latecomers, and from various parts of the world, not just U.K., all thinking they might have a chance at a cla

Health committee  The background is that I was the director of Thalidomide Trust from July 2000 to May 2014. Up until the end the 2006, we accepted as new beneficiaries to the trust only those individuals who had achieved a settlement in respect of their thalidomide damage with Diageo plc, as the