The government
department – which is responsible for national health policies in Canada
– released a statement on Thursday (28 April) that it
authorised a request from Canadian Blood Services to lift the restrictions on
blood donations from men who had sex with men in the last three months.
The new
policy, which goes into effect on 30 September, will screen all potential
donors – regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation – for
high-risk sexual behaviours.
As such,
Canadian Blood Services will bring forward a new donor-screening process to
anyone interested in giving blood and plasma, which will include a sexual
behaviour-based questionnaire.
“Today’s
authorisation is a significant milestone toward a more inclusive blood donation
system nationwide, and builds on progress in scientific evidence made in recent
years,” Health Canada said.
Health Canada
has authorised several changes to the restrictions on blood donated by members
of the LGBT+
community. The regulator dropped the outright ban on gay, bisexual
and queer men donating blood down to five years in 2013, to one year in 2016
and to three months in 2019.
Health Canada
added that this latest change was based on a “thorough assessment of evidence
supporting the safety of the revised donor screening”, and it had met with a
“group of scientific and medical experts” in the field of blood safety for a
meeting on 13 April.
Dr Graham
Sher, CEO of Canadian Blood Services, said the approval of their request to
remove the eligibily criteria for queer men is the “result of a over a decade of work to make participation in
Canada’s Lifeline as inclusive as possible” without risking safety or
the security of supply.
“Numerous
2SLGBTQIA+ and other stakeholder groups, researchers and Canadian Blood
Services employees have contributed countless hours to this effort over the
years,” Sher said. “This could not have happened without their hard work.”
Canadian Blood
Services – which operates in all provinces and territories except for Quebec –
said the new screening criteria will ask any donor if they’ve had “new or
multiple sexual partners in the last three months”.
If the answer
is ‘yes’, the service will ask if the person had anal sex with any of these
partners, and the individual may be required to wait three months in order to
donate blood and plasma.
“While this
eligibility change represents a significant step on our continual journey to
build a more diverse, equitable and inclusive national transfusion and
transplantation system, we still have considerable work to do to build trust
and repair relationships with 2SLGBTQIA+ communities,” Sher added.
Michael Kwag –
acting executive director of Community-Based Research Centre (CBRC), a
non-profit that champions the health of LGBT+ people in Canada – said lifting
the blood donation ban means Canada is “finally catching up to other countries”, which already
operated with a gender-neutral approach to donor screenings.
“Health
Canada’s original policy was discriminatory and encouraged stigma and ignorance
around queer men’s and trans people’s health,” Kwag said. “It also undermined Canada’s
blood supply, which can run precariously low.”
But CBRC said
that more work needed to be done as the original donation policy “contributed
to the stigmatising idea that gay, bisexual and
men who have sex with men are inherently unsafe”. As such, the non-profit said
Canadian Blood Services must engaged in “public education campaigns to dispel
stereotypes” and “fight misconceptions about our communities”.
Canadian Blood
Services promised to spend the next couple of months preparing to implement the
new inclusive blood donation criteria. This includes updating systems and
processes as well as training staff.
The move puts
Canada in line with many other countries – including Britain, France, Hungary and Greece – that have eased or eliminated their
homophobic blood bans in recent years.
SOURCE: PINK NEWS
No comments:
Post a Comment