A clinic near the University of British Columbia (UBC) is allowing sexually active gay men to donate their blood for research purposes.
The Canadian Blood Services’ Network Centre for Applied Development (netCAD) launched the campaign in February. netCAD is operated by Canadian Blood Services (CBS), the national organization that manages blood supply across the country.
Canadian Blood Services hosted the Rainbow Donor Clinic in netCAD’s clinic near UBC’s campus on Feb. 4.
Donations from gay men “will contribute to valuable research and development projects that ensure our blood system and transfusion medicine in Canada is continually improving and evolving,” according to the description on the clinic’s Facebook event page.
Currently, only gay men who have not been sexually active for five years are eligible to donate their blood for transfusions, as they are seen as a high-risk group.
According to Dana Devine for Canadian Blood Services, sexually active gay donors are important to netCAD because they are still able to provide blood to support research and quality improvement project regardless of the current ban.
Sexually active gay men who donate can also help by encouraging friends and family to donate, Devine said.
McGill University professor Mark Wainberg, who specializes in HIV-AIDS research, believes the ban is discriminatory and leads to discrimination and stigma towards gay men.
“I want blood donations to go up. They used to be very active blood donors but now they are eliminated,” Wainberg said. “When the ban was introduced, it was justified because we didn’t have good tests to screen the blood supply, and now we have fantastic ones. Even if a gay man gives contaminated blood, we are going to catch it.”
Merissa Taylor-Meissner, programming co-ordinator at Carleton’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Centre, supports the clinic. She said it will resolve the discrimination surrounding gay men and blood donations.
“We believe that the blood ban is blatantly homophobic and trans-misogynistic, and we hope that this study will dispel the myths that exist around queer blood donations,” she said.
