The same eligibility criteria are now applied to all blood donors at Héma-Québec. A homosexual man who has had a sexual relationship with another man will no longer have to abstain for three months to do so.
A “gender neutral” questionnaire will be submitted to all applicants.
“We are going to assess the risk on the sexual level in terms of individual behavior rather than based on belonging to a group,” Héma-Québec spokesperson Laurent-Paul Ménard said on Sunday, qualifying this progress of “major”.
Anyone who has had a single 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 she has had anal sex with one of these people, regardless of their sexual orientation. “There, it is a factor of exclusion for a period of three months, from the date of the last annual sexual relation”, indicates Laurent-Paul Ménard.
A decried 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-decried way of doing things.
Now, we will assess the risk on an individual basis. So it’s the behaviors of a person whether they can qualify or not, regardless of whether they’re heterosexual, homosexual or pansexual.
Laurent-Paul Ménard, Héma-Québec spokesperson
This measure had already been implemented in Quebec on October 6 for plasma donations. Héma-Québec is therefore expanding it as of Sunday for blood donations.
How many people will now be able to donate blood thanks to this change? “It doesn’t matter what will happen, whether there is this progress, if only on the societal level […]this is important news,” explains Laurent-Paul Ménard.
A shorter and shorter abstinence
Before 2013, it was simply forbidden for men who have sex with men to donate blood at Héma-Québec. Other relaxations were then made, including the possibility for those who had a sexual relationship 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.
In order 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 samples collected.
The next relaxation that could be made in the Héma-Québec criteria concerns the prohibition for people who have 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, to donate blood for life, says Laurent Paul-Ménard.
“As far as sexual risks are concerned, we are quite at the forefront in Quebec, Canada and the United Kingdom,” he adds.