'I'm watching very closely what is going on in the American courts'

IAN Baird was 14 when he was taken into a small room at Glasgow’s Yorkhill hospital and told he had a new type of viral infection.

A diagnosed haemophiliac since the age of two, he was a regular visitor to the hospital for treatment with the blood products he needed to stay healthy.

Knowing little of viruses, he took the information in his stride, and only became alarmed about it when the infection, by then called HIV, became the subject of panic news stories and television advertisements 18 months later.

Now 33, Baird is keeping a close eye on developments in California’s northern district court, where accusations that he was the victim of a conspiracy have now been made.

While the teenage Baird calmly accepted his Factor VIII clotting agent in all innocence in the early 1980s, it is alleged that the US companies which made it already knew by then that it was potentially deadly.

Baird, who lives with his wife, Isobel, near Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, said: "HIV was not known by that name when I was diagnosed with it and I didn’t really know what it was, so I ignored it and got on with my life. I was told a couple of years later that I had what was being talked about on the TV adverts.

"It became known at school that I was HIV positive. I wasn’t victimised: people already knew I was different from the days I had to wear a crash helmet because of the dangers posed by my haemophilia. But I was quite glad to leave."

After effective drugs to prevent HIV developing into full-blown Aids were developed in the late 1980s, Baird started treatment with them. But over the next four years his immune system deteriorated rapidly and he was hospitalised with an Aids-related illness in 1995, at which point he was given four to five months to live.

Further new treatments saved him, but he has since had to take two dozen pills a day to protect him from further infection.

Two years ago the IT consultant was told he also had Hepatitis C, which has damaged his liver and causes stomach pain. If his liver is further damaged he will eventually need a transplant, or die. He was infected with both viruses by Factor VIII.

"I’m watching very closely what is going on in America," he said.