The same eligibility criteria are now applied to all Héma-Québec blood donors: a homosexual man who has had a sexual relationship with another man will no longer have to abstain for three months to do so.
All applicants will be submitted to a “gender neutral” questionnaire.
“We will assess sexual risk in terms of individual behavior rather than belonging to a group,” Héma-Québec spokesman Laurent-Paul Ménard said on Sunday, qualifying this progress as “important”.
Anyone who has had only one sexual partner in the last three months will thus be able to qualify, a priori, for a blood donation, regardless of their sexual orientation.
Those with two or more partners will also qualify, unless you have had anal intercourse with one of these people, regardless of their sexual orientation. “There, it is an exclusion factor for a period of three months, from the date of the last anal intercourse,” indicates Laurent-Paul Ménard.
A denigrated way of doing things
Previously, men who had sex with other men were automatically disqualified unless they waited three months before donating blood, a long-maligned way of doing things.
We will now assess the risk on an individual basis. So it’s a person’s behaviors whether or not they qualify, whether they’re heterosexual, homosexual, or pansexual.
Laurent-Paul Ménard, spokesman for Héma-Québec
This measure had already been implemented in Quebec on October 6 for plasma donations. Héma-Québec has therefore been expanding it since Sunday for blood donations.
How many people will now be able to donate blood thanks to this change? “It doesn’t matter what happens, if there is this progress, even if only on a social level […]this is important news,” explains Laurent-Paul Ménard.
An ever shorter abstinence
Before 2013, it was simply forbidden for men who had sex with men to donate blood in Héma-Québec. Other relaxations were then made, including the possibility for those who have had sexual intercourse with another man to wait five years before being able to donate blood.
The duration of this abstinence was then increased to twelve months in 2016, then to three months of abstinence in 2019.
To eliminate any criteria for blood donations, Laurent Paul-Ménard explains that there will have to be technological advances in “pathogen inactivation”, a method used to eliminate any virus or disease from the collected samples.
The next relaxation that could be made in the Héma-Québec criteria concerns the ban on people who stayed for more than three months in England, or six months in France, between the years 1980 and 1996, due to the predominance of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, donate blood for life, says Laurent Paul-Ménard.
“We’re quite ahead of the curve in sexual risks in Quebec, Canada and the UK,” she adds.
:quality(85)//cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/infobae/WFBYS5GJ6JD5TKSGMACHARMPUA.jpg "Gloria Contrino manages to win in the previous qualifying round against Xenia Trifoi")