Posted on 06/26/2002 1:55:59 PM PDT by Clive
OTTAWA (CP) -- Canadian Blood Services are combing their records to trace blood donations from a gay man who lied about his sexual history, then taunted the service in a series of anonymous e-mails.
The donor, who hasn't been publicly identified, was traced after the agency successfully went to court for an order to have the man's Internet provider identify him.
The next step is to trace the products made from his blood, Ian Mumford, the agency's executive vice-president, said Wednesday.
"That's going to take some time," he said.
"We're talking about a number of years over which this has occurred. We have to trace our records. We then have to notify hospitals and have them check their records and then go from there."
The agency has banned the man from giving blood again and filed a suit against him to recover the costs of tracing the donations, Mumford said.
The agency said there's very little chance of anyone contracting a disease from the blood because each unit of donated blood is tested.
The donor objected to the service's policy of refusing donations from anyone who has had sex with another man since 1977. He sent e- mails saying he regularly lied about his sexual history when giving blood.
The blood agency defends its decision to reject blood from sexually active gay males.
"The decision to defer men who have had sex with men from donating blood is one of many deferrals pertaining to activities which put donors at risk of hepatitis or HIV. The basic premise for this deferral criterion is that the incidence of HIV is much higher in males who have had sex with other males than it is in individuals having exclusively heterosexual sex."
The donor said he is in a stable relationship and has tested HIV-free.
The agency filed the Internet provider suit last week and won the order in five days.
Mumford said he wasn't surprised that the court acted so quickly.
"We felt the case was compelling. We were encouraged," he said. "Clearly the court felt we needed to carry this on to the next step and identify who this person was."
"We would expect Canadians would want us to take these things very seriously."
Now if we could just teach this concept to the airport security people to defer boarding 15-40 year old Arab males...
AIDs scare in blood supply, like that is a new topic.The Red Cross does not really want me to donate my blood because I am at a possible risk for "mad cow".The IRC and the ARC said that would decimate donations so the "overly precautious" scientists were shot down.
Our leaders believe it is more important to play russian roulette in the name of "tolerance" than it is to safeguard our blood supply.
PC KILLS
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