Who should be liable for funding recombinant factor VIII?

EDITOR—On 26 February the Department of Health announced that, acting on advice from the Committee on the Safety of Medicines, it will inform health authorities of “arrangements to ensure that recombinant factor VIII is made available to those [haemophiliac] children under the age of 16 who are not already receiving it, and to new patients.”1 This policy is a response to the perceived threat from blood products contaminated with the new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease prion. This threat is largely theoretical,1-3 although many …