RIGHTS-CANADA: Blood System Wrong to Target Gay Donors – Activists

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Jul 9 2002 (IPS) - The agencies charged with managing Canada’s blood supply are contravening this country’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms by excluding blood donations from men who have had sex with other men at least once since 1977, say activists.

“There is no longer an identifiable biomedical reason for an exclusion category that is as broad as that,” says Ron Chaplin, spokesperson for the Ottawa-based Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere (EGALE Canada).

It is illegal in Canada to discriminate on a number of grounds, including sexual orientation, except in exceptional circumstances. “You have to justify the discrimination,” adds Chaplin, hinting that Canadian Blood Services (CBS) and its Quebec equivalent Hema-Quebec – both non-profit, charitable organisations – might one day face legal challenges.

It has been argued that no one in Canada has the right to donate blood – both CBS and Hema-Quebec will accept or reject free and voluntary blood donations from individuals based on medical criteria to protect recipients.

But the Canadian charter also carries a provision that every person including a potential blood donor must be “treated with respect and dignity under the law”, says Chaplin.

While CBS has been willing to discuss the wording of questions presented to potential donors, the agency’s priority is protecting the blood system from contamination, says its media spokesperson Jirina Vik.

“The basic premise for this deferral is that the incidence for HIV is much higher among gay males who have sex with other males than it is for individuals having heterosexual sex. So, the basis for any reason is based on scientific medical evidence,” Vik told IPS.

“We don’t ask (potential blood donors) ‘are you gay? are you married? or anything’. We ask male donors ‘have you had sex with a man even one time since 1977?’ I think that is clear enough and it is not targeting a group. It is targeting men.”

Still, some Canadian doctors who specialise in HIV-AIDS, including Dr. Don Kilby, are calling upon blood collection agencies to revisit their screening policy “in light of today’s reality”.

Kilby, director of the University of Ottawa Health Services Clinic, says that CBS is more sweeping in its exclusion of gay men than it is with, for instance, black people from sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV and AIDS has become endemic.

Kilby is not urging that the CBS “play the race card like it has with the gay card”, but he worries that the logical conclusion of any excessive exclusion policy is fewer people available to supply blood for the healthcare system.

When Canada faced a public health emergency in the mid-1980s, it seemed to make sense scientifically to exclude all gay males from blood donations because they are the largest single group vulnerable to HIV and AIDS because of their sexual practices, particularly multiple partners and anal sex.

At the time, hospitalised patients (particularly hemophiliacs) were dying from AIDS after receiving infusions of donated blood, found later to be contaminated with HIV.

Today, because it is easier to screen out potential donors who are HIV-positive, blood collectors like CBS should not be excluding gay males in monogamous relationships, says Kilby.

The Ottawa doctor suggests it is possible for gay males in 2002 to test negative for HIV even if they had unprotected sex with other men in the 1970s before settling down with one sexual partner in the 1980s.

Dr. Phil Berger, who treats AIDS patients in Toronto, says that Canada’s blood collectors should stop “stigmatising” gay men as a potential danger to the blood system. Instead, he urges that they concentrate on rooting out individuals admitting to risky behaviour, such as anal sex between two males without the protection of a condom.

Chief of the department of family and community medicine at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Dr. Berger adds that Canada’s blood collection already relies on the “good faith” of donors.

Ironically, adds Don Kilby, “gay men cannot donate blood but they can give away their organs such as their heart, liver or eyes”. He says people administrating organ donations “are not under the same kind of pressures” to exclude a whole group, such as homosexuals.