Page 1307 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 11 April 2018
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As Mr Steel’s motion notes, in 2012 the Australian Red Cross undertook an independent review of blood donor referrals relating to sexual activity. The review was chaired by the dean of medicine at Monash University and included experts from across the medical profession. This review was undertaken on the understanding that the primary concern was the safety of blood, blood products and the public.
The review recommended that the deferral period for men who have sex with other men should be reduced from 12 months to six months, based on the maximum testing window needed to detect STIs including HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C. This would apply a safety margin in accordance with the TGA guidelines for the prevention of transmission of infectious diseases.
This review was provided to the TGA in 2014, which rejected the recommendations to reduce the deferral period for gay blood donors at that time. In its response the TGA cited concerns about increasing the risk of infection. The blood service committed to carry out another review in five years, which has been brought forward at the request of the COAG Health Council.
Since 2014 there have been significant changes in medical technologies and treatments: our ability to detect infections in blood products has improved; testing rates for HIV have continued to increase; and contraception is more widely available, particularly with the very recent inclusion of PrEP on the pharmaceutical benefits scheme.
We also have a precedent for reducing the deferral period, as Mr Steel has noted, with the deferral time in the UK being reduced to three months and France removing deferral periods for low-risk individuals who give plasma donations. With all these factors feeding into the new review, I am hopeful that we will see even stronger evidence to support the reduction of deferral periods for men who have sex with other men to be able to donate blood.
I would like to raise one other issue today as part of this discussion. Of course men who have sex with other men are not the only group considered a high risk for blood donation. Similar restrictions also apply to sex workers, who will be covered by the blood service review, which is good.
However, there is one group which is outside the scope of the review: it is people who have a history of intravenous drug use. The current questionnaire before you can donate blood asks whether you have “ever used drugs by injection or been injected, even once, with drugs not prescribed by a doctor or a dentist.” Under the current eligibility criteria, if you answer yes to this question, you will never be eligible to donate blood. And of course it is true that people with a history of injecting drug use are at a significantly higher risk of a number of serious infections, particularly hep B and C. However, given improvements in screening and detection, it may well be possible that someone who once injected drugs 20 years ago and has been tested for infections could be a safe and effective blood donor and could help to save someone else’s life.
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