Nova Scotia News - TheChronicleHerald.ca

Nova Scotia News - TheChronicleHerald.ca
Doctors say stricter organ donation rules could lead to deaths
By JOHN GILLIS Health Reporter
Wed. Jan 9 - 5:09 AM

Halifax doctors are worried a new blanket ban on organ donations from gay men could lead to deaths by shrinking an already small pool of donors.

Health Canada recently altered its regulations to exclude any man who has had sex with a man in the previous five years from donating tissue.

The move surprised and upset Dr. Mark Walsh, surgical director of liver and kidney transplantation at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax.

"This stipulation is ridiculous," he said Tuesday. "We should be careful about telling people ‘Don’t bother even thinking about donation.’ That’s going to turn off a segment of the population, which is unfair to both donors and recipients."

One lost donor could lead to several deaths, he noted.

Dr. Walsh said he has a patient who needs a liver transplant within days to survive but he’s now in a position where he’d have to turn down an organ if it happened to come from a gay man, despite the hospital’s screening procedures.

He said each potential donor and recipient must be considered individually.

The QEII has always screened potential donors with medical histories, questionnaires (for surviving relatives) to detect high-risk behaviour and blood tests to detect viruses like HIV or hepatitis, said Dr. Stephen Beed, an intensive-care specialist and medical adviser to the provincial organ donation program.

He said the new regulation is overkill.

"We need to be careful that we don’t screen with too broad a brush," Dr. Beed said.

He said gay men as a group don’t necessarily pose any more risk as donors than heterosexuals.

"For somebody who is, for example, in a monogamous relationship and who has been practising safe sex, I would overall conclude that the risk there would be comparable to many other people," he said.

Dr. Beed said the screening system is not perfect and blood tests can produce false negative results but the possibility of infection transmission needs to be weighed against the potential life-saving benefit of transplantation.

"That small risk, as real as it is, may be acceptable to somebody who’s near death," he said.

A similar Health Canada regulation prevents any man who has had sex with a man since 1977 from ever donating blood. That restriction has been labelled discriminatory by gay advocacy groups like EGALE Canada and the Canadian Federation of Students.

Other people who cannot donate organs under the regulations include prison inmates and those who have spent more than 72 straight hours in custody in the preceding year, people with recent tattoos or piercings, people who have had sex for money or drugs within five years and people who have used non-medical intravenous drugs in the preceding five years.

A Health Canada spokeswoman responded to media calls with an e-mail.

Carole Saindon wrote that the regulations are based on risk and not lifestyle and that a man who has had sex with another man within five years is a high risk for transmitting infectious disease.

She noted that a gay man who had been abstinent for five years would not be excluded but a straight man who had had even one sexual encounter with a man in that period would be.

Ms. Saindon said the new regulations stem from a 1999 House of Commons committee recommendation for national standards on cells, tissues and organs intended for transplantation.

She said no group raised concerns about the changes throughout an extensive consultation process and all organ transplant programs across Canada have registered to say they are meeting the new standards.

( jgillis@herald.ca)