Canadian blood agency to revisit donation policy

Ban on blood from men who’ve had sex with men being reviewed

KELLY EBBELS THE MCGILL DAILY (MCGILL UNIVERSITY)

MONTREAL (CUP) — A push to change Canada’s blood donation policies may have helped spark a roundtable consultation on the current ban on donations from men who have had sex with men.

The current Canadian Blood Services policy states that men who have had sex with a man at least once since 1977 are ineligible to donate blood, as a result of higher incidences of AIDS among homosexual males.

At the November Canadian Federation of Students semi-annual general meeting, the McGill University student society initiated a motion mandating the CFS to campaign for blood collection agencies to change their policies. It passed nearly unanimously on the grounds that the policy was discriminatory, as it disqualifies people from giving blood on the basis of sexual orientation rather than unsafe sex.

Since then, CFS has engaged in a letter-writing campaign to Quebec blood collection agency Héma-Québec and Canadian Blood Services (CBS), which operates in the rest of Canada, to hold a formal consultation process on the policy.

Last week, the CBS invited the Federation to discuss the policy at a formal consultation in April. CBS director of media relations Lorna Tessier said that the consultation was a CBS initiative.

“We designed the consultation . . . This isn’t a result of the CFS sending a letter to us,” she said, explaining that the meeting will be part of a larger consultation strategy that includes an independent risk assessment and a review of new scientific evidence and technological advancements.

According to Tessier, about 30 groups have been invited to the consultation, which will be broken down into two separate groups, with interests groups like the CFS and Canadian AIDS Society in one and CBS’s standing committee of external stakeholders — health-care, patient, and donor groups, as well as corporate and community partners — in the other.

“It informs our decision-making to discuss these issues with individuals,” Tessier said.

If any decisions about policy changes are made, they must be submitted to Health Canada for approval. According to Tessier, blood donation policies are regularly reviewed, with the policy in question last reviewed in 2001. At that time, CBS decided not to submit a new policy to Health Canada for approval.

Although Brent Farrington, CFS national deputy chairperson, would not disclose specifics of the CFS’s plan for the meeting, he said that the Federation would demonstrate that the CBS’s blood screening policy against men who have had sex with men is ungrounded.

“We’re going to show, through statistics, that CBS’s current blood donation policy is discriminatory,” said Farrington. “They’re purely discriminating because of a stereotype, and they’re violating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

He pointed out that Health Canada also mandates all blood be tested after it is collected.

In response, Tessier argued that both screening and blood testing were necessary to provide the safest blood possible.

Max Silverman, a vice-president of the McGill student society and the main mover of the blood-donation policy motion at the CFS general meeting, said that the CFS campaign seemed to have rendered quick results.

“I’m happy that I was right in my analysis that CFS could be used for grassroots campaigns. I think it’s cool that things are moving on this,” Silverman said.

The McGill student society, which recently became a prospective member of CFS, sent 13 councilors to the meeting.

The student society has been one of the most outspoken critics of the blood-donation policy for years, and in 2006, banned Héma-Québec blood drives from the student society building. Last year, McGill students staged a protest where heterosexual males claimed to have had sex with men in order to be denied donation.

The Public Health Agency of Canada, in its 2005 report on HIV/AIDS, found that three-quarters of homosexual men “rarely or never” practise unsafe sex. The report also found that in 2005, an estimated 58 per cent of new HIV infections in Canada were among men who have sex with men, up from 30 per cent in 1996.

Héma-Québec and CBS have held the ban against blood from men who’ve had sex with men since the early 1980s, when they took over control of blood collection from the Red Cross, which had the same policy.