Blood donations drop by 15% as hepatitis C scandal scares off donors

Blood donation levels have fallen by 15 per cent over the past three years, largely because of fallout from the hepatitis C scandal, the Blood Transfusion Service Board admitted yesterday.

It started a campaign to attract new donors and persuade 10,000 of its regular donors to resume giving blood.

The BTSB chief executive, Mr Liam Dunbar, confirmed that donations were running at 2,500 a week, but 3,000 were needed for emergency and routine cases requiring transfusion in Irish hospitals.

"It's extremely tight. There will be a crisis down the road if it does not improve, if we don't get back up to between 150,000 to 160,000 donations a year," he said.

The BTSB was living in dread of a major disaster and not having sufficient quantities of blood, Mr Dunbar said. "We are not looking for a once-off response. We are looking for people to come and regularly donate."

The decline has been steadily worsening since 1994 with the loss of regular donors. The number of new donors had not declined, although selection criteria have been tightened and the BTSB is declining more donors.

He accepted that people had lost confidence in the service because of the hepatitis C crisis, but he had to "separate out that issue and ensure an adequate and appropriate amount of blood was available for people who need it".

The difficulty was that the public related blood collection to hepatitis C. People had failed to make the distinction between blood giving, "a very safe process", and receiving it where problems had been in the past.

"Hepatitis C was tragic and everyone is sorry about it. We are trying to deal with it. Unfortunately people are saying, `Look, I have no trust in the organisation'. I recognise there is an issue of trust. In order to recapture that trust, I wish to stress to donors that current testing and screening are of the highest international standards."

The campaign, facilitated by extended opening hours at Pelican House in Dublin, particularly at evening time, and greater use of mobile units around the State, underlined that blood donation was a positive thing. The campaign slogan reads: "Don't depend on other people to give blood, they're depending on you." Pelican House was still attracting more than 120,000 donations. "But the emphasis of this campaign is to appeal to donors and potential donors to give blood over the coming months in order to raise, on a sustained basis, the level of blood donations throughout the country."

Up to 3,000 people are to be asked to come to the aid of the BTSB when members of Rotary Clubs throughout Ireland begin a blood bank scheme in December which is to be run in association with official blood banks in Dublin and Belfast.