Blood scandal victim says award-winning garden 'saved him from dark hole'

Article excerpt

Steve Damon, a victim of the infected blood scandal that contaminated thousands of NHS transfusions in the 1970s and 1980s, has found solace in an unlikely place: his award-winning garden at his Market Harborough home. The carefully tended space has become his refuge, offering both physical activity and mental restoration as he processes decades of trauma from contracting HIV and hepatitis C through contaminated blood products. Damon credits the garden with pulling him back from despair, transforming what might have been a spiral into darkness into something productive and beautiful. His story adds a human dimension to the wider reckoning over the scandal, which left thousands infected and dozens dead, as inquiries continue and compensation debates rage on.