The issue of paid plasma donations in Canada has taken a new development.
It didn’t take long between the publishing of our joint letter in the Hill Times and the decision by Health Canada to solicit input on the question of paid plasma donations.
Health Canada finally released its report yesterday on the April roundtable in Toronto, doing its best to shoot down concerns raised by those hand-selected by them to participate in that meeting. Despite our national profile and research on this issue, OPSEU was denied an invitation.
However, Health Canada was happy to have the Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association there. The PPTA is an industry lobby group whose mission is, among others, to break down “artificial barriers on trade and compensated donors.”
While 28 organizations had called for a comprehensive national consultation, what we are now getting is no more than a blank invitation to write to Health Canada on the issue before July 26. There is no indication whether the submissions will be made public, read, or whether they will be simply collected as evidence that a consultation had taken place. The consultation process is not highlighted on Health Canada’s website and is very difficult to find.
Given a month to prepare submissions in the dead of summer, it tells us Health Canada really doesn’t care about effective consultation. Our notification didn’t come from Health Canada – despite our subscription to their website and prior contact over this issue. Instead it came from our colleagues at Canadian Doctors for Medicare, who were able to attend the April roundtable.
Presentations by both Health Canada and Canadian Blood Services (CBS) at the earlier invitation-only meeting emphasized that contrary to cautions expressed by the World Health Organization, that paid donations were safe and necessary given shortages of plasma for pharmaceutical use.
CBS and Health Canada don’t see the irony in telling us that the present technology can screen out any virus, while at the same time telling us that the private for-profit Canadian Plasma Resources, the company at the centre of this controversy, will be required to do diligent screening of individuals selling their plasma.
If they are so confident of the technology being foolproof, why do screening at all?
Nowhere in the roundtable report does CBS admit that they contributed to that plasma shortage by closing down their last dedicated volunteer plasma collection centre in April 2012. That centre was producing more than 10,000 units of plasma per year in Thunder Bay. CBS also closed down another blood distribution centre last year in Saint John, New Brunswick.
Instead CBS CEO Graham Sher told the roundtable that Canada couldn’t possibly be self-sufficient in volunteer donated plasma to meet our plasma-based pharmaceutical needs. It does get especially difficult when you close down existing collection sites.
Forty-one of 151 countries belonging to the World Health Organization report producing all or part of plasma-derived medicinal products through the fractionation of plasma collected in the country.
Sher says we would need to raise between 600,000 and 700,000 litres of plasma for fractionation in order for Canada to become self-sufficient, yet Canadian Plasma Resources says we are already collecting 20 per cent.
Despite Sher’s claim that it would be impossible, Canadian Plasma Resources says that it intends to make us self-sufficient by eventually operating 10 paid donation centres that will achieve a production rate of 400,000 litres annually (not the 600,000 to 700,000 litres Sher says is required).
OPSEU Diablogue 