A new weapon fights AIDS and discrimination in one fell swoop

Technology, changing demographics of HIV-positive Canadians mean that Canadian Blood Services policy must change

Tessa Vanderhart, Staff

Thanks to new technology, it only takes 60 seconds to determine, with 99.96 accuracy, whether someone is infected with HIV.

Even better, most Canadian provinces have had the tests for about a year now.

So it is difficult to understand how Canadian Blood Services continues to justify its policy that any man who has had sex with any man, safe or unsafe, since 1977 (30 years ago!) is permanently banned from donating blood — as is any woman who has had sex with any man who has had sex with a man since 1977.

This new technology, emerging AIDS crises overseas and at home among First Nations, immigrants, and injection drug users render this ban nothing short of discriminatory.

Canada Blood Services does have the best interest of Canadians at heart. Given that CBS was created as a result of the tainted blood scandal — when more than 1,200 Canadians who received blood from the Red Cross before 1990 were infected with HIV and hepatitis C — it is not hard to see why the government-run blood agency wants to be as safe as possible.

But times have changed. Where those people were infected with hepatitis C because the Red Cross didn’t have access to the new test, CBS has top-of-the-line equipment, including the fastest HIV tests ever — the virus can be detected in seconds after only a short window period, a vast improvement from past tests that only tested for AIDS, not the virus that causes it.

But trying to tell CBS that, as Ontario Health Minister George Smitherman (a gay man) is “like banging your head against the wall.”

On their website, CBS estimates that in 75 per cent of HIV cases reported in Canada, transmission from man to man during sex was the reason.

However, this is old information. Today, only 51 per cent of HIV is among men who have had sex with men, and more and more often HIV infection occurs among First Nations people and recent immigrants.

In fact, in 2005, 22.4 per cent of all cases of HIV were among aboriginals, comprising between 200 and 400 of the new cases in that year. Fifty-three per cent of those new cases are attributed to the use of injected drugs. More shockingly, 38.9 per cent of those infected were women; only 25 per cent of the total number of HIV infections in Canada is attributed to women, though the number of young women infected continues to rise.

While only 1.5 per cent of Canadians originated in a country where HIV is prevalent, 7.7 per cent of HIV infections were attributed to immigrants from those countries. When only new infections in 2005 are considered, “16% of new HIV infections in Canada were attributed to heterosexual individuals who were not injecting drug users and were born in a country where HIV is endemic.”

CBS does not allow those who have lived in a handful of African countries where a new strain of HIV — a HIV-I Group O — has been discovered to donate but does allow donors from India, Russia, and the rest of Africa. While the threat that HIV-I Group O presents is undoubtedly huge, in 2006, 5.6 million Indians were living with AIDS. Other countries with similarly “low” — one per cent — infection rates, but high populations living with AIDS include China and Russia as well as many other south Asian countries and many African countries. People from these countries make up the vast majority of Canada’s 250,000 immigrants per year.

Of course, I am not saying that all of these people should be banned from donating blood. But when the gay donation ban first came into place in 1983, there was also a ban on blood from Haitian emigrés, due to a very high rate of infection. The ban on Haitians was eliminated in 1990 — but 18 years and light-years of technology and information about AIDS later, the ban on men who have had sex with men remains.

Quite simply, with other risk factors for HIV increasing in prevalence, and MSM-caused HIV decreasing, there is simply no reason for this oversight in policy.

CBS amdended its malaria policy — those who have spent more than six months in a country where malaria is prevalent is banned from donating for three years. And other countries have shortened the delay — Australia, Argentina and Brazil allow men to donate blood one year after last having sex with a man. In South Africa, according to the Canadian AIDS network, the period is six months.

Italy, Spain and Portugal have all changed their blood donation policies so that homosexual males can donate blood — but those who have had more than three sexual partners, homo- or heterosexual, cannot. Of course, this policy is far from perfect, not only because of the fact that gay men are still more likely to contract HIV, but also because loopholes allowed at least one Italian hospital to turn away a blood donor based solely on his sexual orientation, as reported in the Guardian.

However, HIV prevalence among Italian blood donors has decreased since the policy was instituted, especially among first-time donors, according to government statistics.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that CBS will amend its policy on accepting blood from men who have had sex with men. With a test that can determine HIV infection within seconds, a waiting period of one year — or three, if that is the best that can be done — is infinitely more fair, and would go very far to alleviating the other issue the CBS talks constantly about: a shortage of blood.

CBS says that science is the reason for the ban. But science increasingly makes blood donations from men who have had sex with men — and even men who continue to have sex with men — safe.

And when only last summer there was a nine-year low in CBS reserves, you’d better that the science — and the math — will stir CBS to change.

Tessa Vanderhart is the editor-in-chief of the Manitoban.