Canada announced on Thursday the end of restrictions for what gay men and bisexuals can donate blood. With this, an impediment that dates back to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s is ended.
Instead, donors will be screened for detect high-risk sexual behaviorregardless of gender or sexuality.
“With this new approach, the Canadian Blood Services will introduce a donor screening questionnaire based on sexual behavior that will be applied to all blood and plasma donors,” said the Health Department it’s a statement.
The policy change, which will apply from September, marks an important milestone towards a more inclusive blood donation system, he said.
This is part of a series of changes in the blood donation regime that have been implemented over the last decade, which saw the waiting periods for donations by homosexual men being progressively reduced from a lifetime ban to three months in 2019.
That meant that men who had had sex with men, they had to maintain sexual abstinence and they could only donate blood at least 90 days later.
Low risk of contracting HIV
Over the years, minority advocates said the policy was discriminatory and not based on science. An investigation cited by the Canadian Ministry of Health showed that the current risk of contracting HIV through a blood transfusion, with all the samples analyzed, was estimated to be “very low”: 1 in 20.7 million.
He also noted that there had been no seropositive donations in recent years.
A total ban on gay men donating blood was introduced in 1992 after a contaminated blood scandal that caused thousands of Canadians to become infected with HIV after receiving transfusions.
The Canadian Red Cross, which managed blood donations at the time, had not adequately tested and screened donors. As many as 8,000 Canadians died, according to a public inquiry. Canadian media reported at the time that people in Japan, Germany and the UK had also been infected by blood or plasma sent abroad.
France, Spain, Italy, Israel and the UK have all recently taken similar steps to relax restrictions on blood donations.
