The board of the Irish Blood Transfusion Service will discuss at its next meeting whether it can go ahead with plans to ban blood donations—from this month—from anyone who spent a year in the United Kingdom between 1980 and 1996.
In March this year, in response to concerns about the dangers of patients contracting variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) from donated blood, the service banned donations from anyone who had spent five years in Britain, which led to a drop of 20% in blood supplies and growing concern about shortages.
The transfusion service's deputy chief executive, Andy Kelly, recently said that there was a real risk of a crisis if the fall off in donations was not reversed.
Several European countries have restricted donations from citizens who have spent time in Britain. Austria, Finland, France, and Germany—as well as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan—are deferring donors who have lived in the United Kingdom during the relevant years. The United States, which has further tightened its restrictions, is also concerned about shortages (see article below).
Ireland's second phase restrictions would hit particularly hard: a survey of Irish donors by the transfusion service showed that about 80% had visited the United Kingdom at some time between 1980 and 1999 and that 13% had lived there for six months or more.
The service's chief executive, Martin Hynes, has said that the full scale banning of donations “would decimate the Irish blood supply.”
The service was one of the first in Europe to use leucodepletion—the removal of white cells from blood—to minimise the theoretical risk of vCJD transmission.
Meanwhile a spokesman from the English Department of Health, which still accepts donations from the groups being banned by other countries, said that they had done all they could to reduce the risk in the United Kingdom. All blood has undergone leucodepletion for the past three years, he said.
“We have followed the scientific advice that we had to reduce the risks of transmission. We now take out the white cells from the blood,” he said.
“We have got to have a balance between an unknown risk and whether people need this blood. We need the blood. We don't know how big the risk is.”
All blood plasma products now come from the United States, he added.
The health department was also considering whether it might further reduce any risk by refusing blood donations from people who had already received a blood transfusion, he added.
Figure.
AP PHOTO/ED REINKE
Phlebotomist Lisa Daniel collects a bag of donor blood during an American Red Cross blood drive earlier this year