Edmonton Journal

VALUABLE, BUT NOT FOR SALE

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Banning private companies that pay people to donate blood or plasma from operating, as the Alberta government proposes to do is a good start. But it’s only the first step in ensuring a safe and plentiful domestic supply of blood products.

In unveiling the Voluntary Blood Donations Act on Monday as the third bill of the spring session, Alberta Health Minister Sarah Hoffman is firing a pre-emptive strike against private blood and plasma collection agencies which currently operate in places such as Saskatoon from ever opening shop in Alberta.

She’s following the lead of Ontario and Quebec which have also banned the practice.

Hoffman is right to say that donating blood should not be viewed as a business venture but as a public service by Albertans who want to help save lives by giving their time and blood to the not-for-profit, government-funded Canadian Blood Services.

Besides the inherent tackiness of paying individual­s for their blood, lessons learned during Canada’s tainted-blood scandal in the 1980s when patients received transfusio­ns contaminat­ed with hepatitis C and HIV tell us that security and integrity of the blood system should be the Number 1 priority.

There’s also concern that allowing private collection firms to pay donors and sell their blood on the internatio­nal market curtails public donations and undermines the Canadian culture of voluntary blood giving.

Progressiv­e Conservati­ve health critic Richard Starke rightly points out the hypocrisy of Alberta banning U.S.-style for-profit blood collection when Canada continues to import more than 80 per cent of the plasma it needs each year from U.S. sources that pay donors.

Last year, 60 per cent of the $200 million Alberta set aside for blood and blood products went to importing plasma products and demand is on the rise as it is used in various medical therapies.

Plasma — the liquid component of blood — takes longer to donate than whole blood.

But instead of allowing private companies to do the job of collecting plasma as Starke urges the government to do, Alberta and the other provinces need to work with Canadian Blood Services to significan­tly increase plasma donations.

Currently, the agency collects about 200,000 litres per year of plasma from Canadian donors on a voluntary basis, only about 25 per cent of what’s needed.

To add another 500,000 to 600,000 litres per year, there are plans in the works to open up to 40 new plasma collection facilities across the country over the next few years. Supporting the developmen­t of those facilities is the logical followup to banning for-profit blood collection.

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