“It’s very disingenuous for Trudeau to take a stand with his comrades in arms, the gay caucus, and say, ‘Hey, we’ve done this now,’” said society executive director Gary Lacasse. The head of the Canadian AIDS Society, which has been consulted by Canadian Blood Services for years, said the government should have invested more in research on the impact of PrEP and testing. “For most gay and bisexual men, especially for those who use PrEP - those same folks we’ve been encouraging to use the tools available to us to reduce the impact of HIV in our community - they’ll be ineligible to donate,” Griffiths said. Individuals must be off PrEP for four months before they can donate blood, a criterion implemented at Health Canada’s request in 2019, Canadian Blood Services said. The agency said PrEP, which has become an increasingly popular safe sex practice in the LGBTQ community, affects the sensitivity of their tests, and it’s unclear if PrEP can prevent HIV from appearing in a blood transfusion. CBS says condoms can break.ĬBS also bans individuals who are taking preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) - medication that prevents the transmission of HIV. To allow more men to donate while maintaining the safety of the blood supply, CBS should be asking about safe sexual practices, advocates say, such as condom use. The concern is the new policy “will continue to bar a significant number of gay, bisexual and queer men from donating,” said lawyer Gregory Ko, who represents Christopher Karas, who brought a human rights complaint against the blood donation system. “Once you really look into the details of who is excluded … This will still render many of us ineligible to donate.” “If Canadian Blood Services is expecting a real increase in donations - which at times we’ve really needed - this policy shift doesn’t seem to suggest, in our view, that that will be the case,” Dane Griffiths, director of the Gay Men’s Sexual Health Alliance. The agency said it uses a three-month deferral period because the window for other pathogens like Hepatitis B “is considerably longer,” and three months is the time frame used in the U.K.Ĭritics point out that although everyone will now be asked about anal sex - which carries a higher transmission risk of HIV than other sexual practices - it’s a sexual activity more commonly practised among men who have sex with men, and they will continue to be disproportionately excluded unless in a monogamous relationship. The blood agency says there’s a window of about nine days after an HIV infection when a person may transmit the virus and it is not picked up by testing, hence the need for screening questions. The new rules prohibit all individuals - regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity - from donating if they’ve had anal sex with a new or multiple partners in the last three months.Īll blood donations are tested for diseases including HIV and Hepatitis B and C. “The initial coverage of it was really exciting because it sounded like they were making meaningful changes to stop discriminating against gay men and other people,” Crowe said in an interview, “but when you actually looked into the way they were changing it, it seems like they’re really whitewashing the same policy.” 30.Īdvocates say the new policy - championed as a long-overdue milestone by federal politicians including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau - will still effectively ban many men who have sex with men, while continuing to perpetuate stigmas about them and people who live with HIV. This despite the fact that Crowe’s partner has an undetectable viral load due to medication, and therefore can’t transmit the virus to him.Ĭrowe is just one of what critics say will be a “significant” number of individuals who will continue to be barred under the new blood donor policy, set to take effect by Sept. That’s because Crowe’s partner of six years is HIV-positive, and Canadian Blood Services (CBS) continues to bar individuals from donating if they’ve had sex with a person who is HIV-positive in the last 12 months. For Aaron Crowe, donating blood is a valuable way to contribute to society, having received blood donations himself.īut he remains barred from giving, even in the wake of a decision by Health Canada last week that put an end to the blanket ban on blood donations from men and some transgender women who have had sex with men in the last three months.
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