Blood bank to refuse donors who have lived in UK

People who lived in the UK for a year or more when "mad cow disease" was at its height will no longer be allowed to donate blood under a strict new safety policy to be introduced early next year.

The Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) has said that, because of a recent increase in donations, it is now in a position to implement the policy, aimed at reducing the risk of transmitting vCJD, the human form of BSE.

The ban, which is described as "precautionary", follows an initial prohibition, introduced in March 2001, on donors who had lived in the UK for five years or more between 1980 and 1996. The new ban will apply to anyone who lived in the UK for a year-plus "cumulatively" over the same period.

Announcing the move at the publication of the IBTS annual report for 2001, the agency's national medical director, Dr William Murphy, said it would result in the loss of 5 to 7 per cent of the donor population, or more than 10,000 annual donations.

"It's still not clear whether vCJD can be spread through blood but we have all taken the view that it might be," he said.

Acting chief executive Mr Andrew Kelly said the ban would be introduced early next year but not until donor workshops on the issue had been completed in March.

The report showed the IBTS had 22,056 new donors last year, bringing to 181,684 the total number of donations. Some 21.4 per cent of these were deferred for safety or other reasons.

Mr Kelly said donations had increased by a further 9 per cent this year over 2001, and he put this down to an active advertising campaign and the establishment of regional donor clinics. He added the IBTS's finances had "turned around substantially" in 2002 and, for most of the year, the agency had "been in the black" after a deficit of €4.5 million in 2001.

Mr Kelly said the IBTS would shortly complete a design brief for its proposed centre in Cork, which "hopefully" the Department of Health would fund. He added the agency planned to have a new information technology system in place by the middle of next year, which would be applicable to both centres.

The IBTS also confirmed that the number of donors that fell under a new independent inquiry into the blood bank's delay in informing certain persons of positive hepatitis C test results in the early 1990s had risen to 31. All but one of these had been now written to, said Dr Murphy.

Meanwhile, the agency defended itself from criticism from a long-serving donor over the manner in which he has been excluded from donating again.

Mr Patrick Burke from north Dublin, who has given 139 donations over the past 27 years, said he had been told by the IBTS he could no longer attend its platelet clinic because of the fact that he worked in Nigeria for 12 months in 1985/86. He questioned the logic of the decision, saying "If I am a health risk, I have been so since I returned to Ireland some 16 years ago".

A spokeswoman for the IBTS said it had introduced a new policy last month, which was aimed at combating malaria transmission, whereby anyone who had lived six months continuously in Sub-Saharan Africa was prohibited from donating.